Turn-Based Fantasy

So farewell hope, and with hope farewell fear,
Farewell remorse: all good to me is lost;
Evil, be thou my good.
-- Lucifer, in John Milton's Paradise Lost. Bk. IV. L. 108.

There are no shortage of games whose villains are demons from Hell, and no shortage of games whose protagonists are monsters or demons of some sort. There's an entire sub-genre of games (mostly Japanese) in which heroic half-human characters struggle to overcome their inhuman heritage even as they use their demonic powers to be heroes. There are also a few games, usually tempered with comedy, where the player takes the part of the "forces of darkness." Cryptic Comet's sophomore release, the turn-based strategy play-by-email game Solium Infernum, is nothing like any of the aforementioned games.

Johan Karlsson and Kristoffer Osterman's Dominions 3: The Awakening can be described briefly as a micromanagment-heavy, statistically detailed, “turn-based,” 4x fantasy strategy PBEM game that draws heavily on world mythology. Describing it in detail is difficult, because it is so richly detailed and because, while it mostly does the things you'd expect a “turn-based fantasy” game to do, it does them in surprising ways.

If Styrateg had been published in, say, 1992, we might talk of it in the same breath with Warlords or Heroes of Might & Magic; it's a nice, focussed turn-based fantasy RPG with an engaging story, pretty graphics (in a somewhat retro 2D tile-based mode), and Medieval-style music that's reminiscent of the soundtrack to Europa Universalis.

If you took a trading card game (TCG) like Magic: The Gathering, added some board wargame mechanics, and threw in an online player-matching server, you'd have something very much like SpiritWars.

As in Magic, you have a 'hand' of spells you can cast, with your hand replenished one card per turn. Some of the spells create power sources (think Magic lands), of differing colors; others create defenders who do not move, but can be used to block attacks of enemies nearby on more vulnerable creatures (think walls). Still others are units that can move and attack--think creatures.

Chronic Logic has developed a reputation as one of the best "indie" developers in the field--among other things, they created Bridge Construction Set and Gish. In Kingdom Elemental, they return with a very different game: a tense, nicely polished game of tactical fantasy combat.

From Niels Bauer, creator of the well-regarded Smugglers 3 comes this hybrid turn-based fantasy and dungeon-crawl game.

Above ground, you raise armies and try to conquer the world--but your leader is a "hero," and has to delve into dungeons to gain loot and reputation in order to succeed above ground.

The marriage of a sports management style game with tactical combat seems like a natural. To be sure, it is more difficult to accomplish than a pure management simulation, but for those of us who are control freaks, it's extremely satisfying to actually command our ranged units (wizards, mystery archmages, and archers) on when to let their missiles of destruction fly and to order our heavy-duty (knights, black knights, giants, and minotaurs) into melee after the magical and medieval artillery have softened their targets.

Not infrequently, you run into somebody posting about whether or not open-source development can possibly work for games, and usually concluding that it can't. Very likely the poster has played NetHack, but I guess Rogue-likes don't count. But. What about Battle for Wesnoth?

Battle for Wesnoth is a turn-based fantasy game in which you control a set of heroes and armies, building up over time to defeat AI-controlled opponents. A slew of campaign and scenarios in the game itself provide probably hundreds of hours of gameplay, but an active community provides innumerable new mods and campaigns you can download. It's been localized for something like 20 languages, and ported to just about every viable OS still in active use. And it is, of course, utterly free, both in the "free like beer" and "free like freedom" senses; the source code is open and available.