I was on holiday this week and I ran out of books early (An Ice-Cream War by William Boyd was unexpectedly good.) and my wife doesn’t like two-player games, so I had to think of other options. I had my Ubuntu Netbook Remix netbook, so I decided to try a few computerised boardgames from Sebastian Sohn’s SoftBoard Games geeklist. In order of amount of time played:

• Fabled Lands Application – This ebook adaptation of an advanced gamebook called Fabled Lands from the 1990s was surprisingly entertaining. The program took care of page flipping, game saves and kept track of stats, so it was more fun than reading the original books would be now. It is coded in Java, and ran without any problems. The large version of the application includes some nice fantasy art, making me nostalgic for my childhood of reading White Dwarf. I would have preferred to play Planescape Torment with GemRB, but I could not get that working, so FLApp scratched my RPG itch adequately.
• Jotto – This excellent little deductive wordgame/puzzle runs smoothly under Wine on Linux. Jotto is free and playable with paper and pencil. It definitely deserves more publicity.
• Blokus – I have played the online version at the Blokus website, but this version is much better, although the 3D graphics do not add much. There is an Ubuntu package and it ran well. I could not beat the AI, but that doesn’t say much. This should be included with Ubuntu instead of the lame games on there right now.
• Red November, Strike Force One and Homas Tour (Um Reifenbreite) – These all ran well, but I could not muster up the enthusiasm to read the rules.
• Ra and San Juan – I would have loved to play these and they ran, but they would not scale to my netbook monitor’s weird 1024×576 resolution.
• Trax and Roll Through The Ages would not run at all under Wine. I may give them a spin back in London on my Windows 7 machine, although they have to compete with Dragon Age.