Terminal Games

Text-based games came before graphical ones and still run well in a terminal, from the roguelike line that started with Rogue in 1980 to puzzle, card, arcade and typing games drawn with box characters and color.

 

They install as a single binary, play over SSH on a remote box and use the keyboard alone, which is why they turn up on servers and in dotfiles. Some are ports of long running classics, others are new games written with TUI frameworks such as Ratatui and Textualize.

 

Below is a list of games that run in the terminal.