Gaming has traditionally been one of Linux's weak points. That has changed somewhat in recent years thanks to Steam, GOG, and other efforts to bring commercial games to multiple operating systems, but those games are often not open source. Sure, the games can be played on an open source operating system, but that is not good enough for an open source purist.
So, can someone who only uses free and open source software find games that are polished enough to present a solid gaming experience without compromising their open source ideals? Absolutely. While open source games are unlikely ever to rival some of the AAA commercial games developed with massive budgets, there are plenty of open source games, in many genres, that are fun to play and can be installed from the repositories of most major Linux distributions. Even if a particular game is not packaged for a particular distribution, it is usually easy to download the game from the project's website in order to install and play it.This article looks at puzzle games. I have already written about arcade-style games[1] and board and card games[2]. In future articles, I plan to cover racing, role-playing, and strategy & simulation games.
Atomix
Atomix[3] is an open source clone of the Atomix[4] puzzle game released in 1990 for Amiga, Commodore 64, MS-DOS, and other platforms. The goal of Atomix is to construct atomic molecules by connecting atoms. Individual atoms can be moved up, down, left, or right and will keep moving in that direction until the atom hits an obstacle—either the level's walls or another atom. This means that planning is needed to figure out where in the level to construct the molecule and in