Hedgewars is a free and open-source turn-based artillery game — a Worms-style battler where squads of pink hedgehogs with attitude lob bazookas, grenades and far stranger weapons across fully destructible terrain. You assemble a team, pick a scheme, and take turns firing while the wind and gravity do their best to ruin your aim. It handles up to 8 players in local (hot-seat), LAN or internet multiplayer with optional AI opponents, and adds two single-player campaigns, dozens of missions and challenges, and mini-games on top. Development has been community-driven since 2004, and the whole game is GPLv2 free software that installs from most Linux distributions, Windows, macOS and FreeBSD.

Key Features

• Up to 8-player turn-based combat — hot-seat on one machine, over LAN, or online, with optional computer opponents filling the empty slots.
• Around 58 weapons and utilities — everything from a plain grenade to the watermelon bomb, piano strike, homing pigeon and explosive robotic cake.
• Single-player content — two campaigns totalling 24 missions, plus more than 25 standalone missions for tutorials, target practice and challenges.
• Destructible terrain on infinite maps — randomly generated battlefields, 37 environments and 44 set image maps, or draw your own in the built-in map editor.
• 27 game modifiers and saveable schemes — tune nearly every aspect of a match (health, wind, turn time, weapon sets) and save your favourites as schemes.
• Deep team customisation — over 280 hats and costumes, 32 graves, 13 forts, hundreds of flags and 13 voice packs for your hedgehog squad.
• Huge battles, small sessions — fights with up to 64 hedgehogs on screen, or a quick two-hedgehog match on a small map during a break.
• Mini-games — a set of single-player and multiplayer mini-games built on the same engine.
• Community content, in-game — download community packs straight from the game, or plug in your own custom maps, graves, hats, costumes and artwork.
• Replays and demos — record matches and share demo files with other players.

Why Use Hedgewars?

Worms-style artillery games are almost all proprietary and long-abandoned on modern systems, and the few living ones are monetised. Hedgewars is the free software answer: twenty years of steady development, a genuinely huge arsenal, full local and online multiplayer, and no DRM, accounts, ads or microtransactions. It is a small 2D download that runs happily on modest hardware and on old laptops, it is packaged in most Linux distributions (and on Windows and macOS), and the dedicated server can be built from source so a community can host its own games. Cross-play between platforms is part of the design — a Linux player can join a Windows host without a second thought.

Use Cases

• Multiplayer game nights — hot-seat on a single machine, a LAN party, or an online match with up to 8 players and AI filling gaps.
• Solo play — work through the campaigns and missions, or set up a quick AI skirmish.
• Short casual sessions — the developers’ own tip: fewer hedgehogs, a smaller map, reduced time and health makes a perfect coffee-break match.
• Creative and modding — design maps in the built-in editor, script custom missions, build custom teams and share content packs.
• Running a community server — build the standalone dedicated server and host your own games for friends or a clan.

Platform

Linux · Windows · macOS 10.8+ · FreeBSD · iOS (community build). 32- and 64-bit x86 builds; the engine and game request a very modest amount of RAM and no 3D acceleration.

Licence

Free and open source — released under the GNU GPL v2 (a handful of bundled sound files are under the GFDL or CC BY-SA). The code, the game data and the standalone dedicated server are all open source, so a match can be self-hosted without any proprietary component.

Website

hedgewars.org — downloads, wiki and knowledge base, forum, bug tracker and demo archive. Source code lives in the project’s Mercurial repository (anonymous read access on request).

Similar open-source game

• OpenClonk — free multiplayer action game with fully destructible terrain and the same hot-seat/online party feel.