The obvious answer is the other two casual classics: Space Cadet Pinball and Minesweeper. Possibly also some of the classic board games like Chess, or Go.
this post was submitted on 12 Jan 2025
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Linux Gaming
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Found that pinball Flatpak and it's nice to occasionally play. Hits you in the memories, if you aren't like me and actually play with sounds on.
Balatro!
If he's looking for something social.... Consider Brighter Shores.
It's a modern table top styled MMO by Andrew Gower (the RuneScape guy). Just like RuneScape it's a point and click adventure MMO so ... it's really easy to pick up. It also works great as a windowed game, has low hardware requirements, and everything is saved server side so progress is pretty much impossible to lose.
It's got 2 free episodes (which is a lot of stuff to potentially do) and the optional subscription is currently $5.99/mo so it's also very affordable.
Linux is not natively supported but it runs great under Proton ... and the team seems very keen on making it work on as many platforms as possible.
OpenTTD (Transport Tycoon)
Hedgewars (Worms)
Battle For Wesnoth (awesome turn-based game)
Shattered Pixel Dungeon (Rogue-like)
0A.D. (Age of Empires)
Frozen Bubble (Puzzle Bobble)
Pingus (Lemmings)
Mindustry (Factorio)
FreeOrion (Masters of Orion)
I wouldn’t put forward 0 A.D. in this situation. That’s a full-blown 3D game. Even Wesnoth and Orion might be a bit much for this case.
I totally get you but my rather elderly father loves 3D games - they’ve put hundreds of hours into Skyrim at this point haha. Could never get comfortable with keyboard and mouse but took to a gamepad incredibly quickly.
Sometimes a theme like fantasy or history can be the catalyst to give something the time and patience to learn it. My old man was a huge LOTR fan back in the day (the books especially) and thus the desire to play Skyrim was enough for him to suffer through learning a gamepad and analogue sticks.
Simon Tatham's Puzzles has classic puzzle games like MasterMind and Sudoku plus a bunch that became classics to me after I discovered them there.
About every year or so one of the ones I have previously ignored "clicks" for me and becomes a new favorite of mine.
I haven't played with vanilla Debian in forever, but if there's a good "Software Center" style overlay to the package manager, I bet he could find some good stuff on his own. The "Discover" app in Ubuntu actually categorizes the games by genre. Pingus, Minesweeper clones, Sokoban clones, Poker, Chess, Checkers, Go, Reversi.
Townscaper.
Click buttons and build cute, tiny villages.
Zero pressure. Easy to pick up and put down.
Awesome suggestion. It has a browser preview!
Steam may be some indirection he may be troublesome about (hope this isn't lost in translation).
In the same vein I will name "Tiny Glade".
Not 100% sure whether he'd like it or not, but HyperRouge. Can easily be played with just the mouse. At least that's how I play it since I cannot figure out how to move using keyboard.
There's the free version, which might be available in whatever default software repository is enabled, available through GitHub for compilation, can probably run the free windows version through wine or proton, or there's the Steam version if you wanna support the devs and/or like things like achievements or online leaderboards to track your progress.
If he likes solitaire-like number games, maybe 2048?
Game and game-related packages in the Debian Testing repositories:
https://packages.debian.org/testing/games/
If you install flatpak, you might also want to browse here:
https://flathub.org/apps/category/Game/
He observed me updating Debian to testing (i will pin it when the next name is published)
Pin what? The work-in-progress that is currently Debian Testing already has a code name: Trixie. Do you mean you'll switch his apt config from Testing back to Stable once Trixie is released as the new Stable?
Appreciated, will consider this afterwards (when more contributions of Lemmes are done). I already fixed my post: I pinned him to trixie (I used it subconsciously). I won't attempt a (unsupported) downgrade :- ).
You are awesome for following up, Sir or Madame.
I won’t attempt a (unsupported) downgrade :- ).
If you mean changing the apt config from trixie back to stable, that will be perfectly safe to do when trixie becomes the new stable. At that point, they will both be the same distro. The advantage of doing this is that you will automatically get the next stable release that eventually replaces trixie.
Not Linux-specific, but if he's looking for new casual games take a look at:
OpenTyrian is fullscreen, but easy to play with mouse. The player steers a tiny spaceship and it shoots when you hold down the mouse button. You can pause any time with Esc and it has even game speed settings and easter eggs.