NERTS! Online is the free to play card game from the clever people at Zachtronics (Eliza, Opus Magnum, Infinifactory) that was created to help them play together that they released free to the public.

It's not an original game though, as Nerts has been around in some form since the late 1890s. It has also been called Pounce or Racing Demon. Zachtronics mentioned they "learned about it from our artist Kyle, who has played it for years, and started playing it after lunch in the Zachtronics office. Over time we added more to it, including house rules, longer tournaments, and even a theme song".

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At release the multiplayer was limited to Steam friends and people you're in Steam Groups with. It worked but now they've nicely expanded it to have public lobbies. Now anyone can download it free (it's properly free too, no micro transactions), create a lobby and make it public for anyone else playing to join.

Seems like a really slick game overall too, great to see more like it and being free means there's no barrier to enjoying it with your friends and others alike.

Find NERTS! Online free on Steam .

Well this is quite unusual. You've played monster catching games before but not like this. Familiars.io put a fresh spin on it all and it's quite ingenious.

Developed as a pixel-art retro-looking browser game, it's super accessible since you can play it on pretty much anything that can run some simple graphics in a browser window. It's an MMO too, so you can join up with others and chill out. When you want to, go off and catch some monsters, engage is some PvP and perhaps find a new favourite game waiting for you.

However, while it has a fun face there's a deep dark lurking inside it. These creatures can't be put into a special healing centre, oh no, once they reach 0 HP that's it – they're gone. Instead of you having permadeath like some roguelike, your creatures need their HP closely watched! That one twist is enough to set it apart from many other games doing a similar setting.

Familiars.io is currently under active development, with new content being added to it regularly. One of the most recent updates added in a pretty sweet feature: you have your own private resort. You can warp there whenever you want, and drop off up to 50 creatures to keep them out of harm's way. Nice little touch that.

It's also entirely free and you can play it on itch.io .

How about a free game for the coming weekend? Humble Store has Bomber Crew going free during their new Winter Sale so you can pick up some other cheap games too. Bomber Crew is a really highly rated and enjoyable game too, so it's a pretty good pick to get free!

As for the new Humble Winter Sale, it's a big one with lots of publishers big and small joining in. Plus there's of course masses of fantastic indie games that deserve plenty of attention. If you want to look over what the bigger lot have take a look at the sales for SEGA , 2K , Deep Silver , Humble Games , Codemasters , THQ Nordic , Kalypso Media and also Team17 have an existing sale still on.

Need some suggestions? Here's a few games I consider essential purchases for a Linux gamer:

• XCOM 2 - Collection - 85% off. Easily my favourite turn-based strategy game, especially with the expansion and all the mods available. So much repeatable fun to be had.
• Spec Ops: The Line - 80% off. To this day it still has one of the best stories when it comes to a third-person miltiary shooter.
• Life is Strange - Complete - 80% off. A choice-based adventure with plenty of fun twists.
• Two Point Hospital - 75% off. The modern reimagining of Theme Hospital.
• Planetary Annihilation: TITANS - 75% off (has issues with AMD GPUs currently). Real-time strategy spread across multiple planets.
• Move or Die - 75% off. A highly amusing party game.
• Galak-Z - 75% off. Incredible deep-space 2D dog-fighting shooter.
• Overload - 70% off. One of the best modern 6-degree-of-freedom shooters.
• Iconoclasts - 70% off. A truly excellent pixel-art platformer metroidvania.
• 7 Days to Die - 66% off. Probably one of the most satisfying open-world survival games around that mixes first-person shooting, crafting, building with destructible terrain and at times a tower defence too with zombie waves.
• Dungeons 3 - 60% off. Build a dungeon as an evil overlord, with plenty of comedy sprinkled in. What's not to love?

Head here to get your free copy of Bomber Crew. The giveaway lasts until January 16 at 10AM Pacific time / 6PM UTC.

Also take a look at the Humble Store for tons of games discounted, with the sale going on until January 28.

Dust: The Abandoned Land is an in-development 2D open-world survival game, one that has a surprising amount of features and you can play it online with others. Developed by Mathieu Guillame-Bert, a Google Zurich staffer as a hobby.

Set in a post-apocalyptic randomly generated world, Dust is a real-time survival game with permadeath in an open-world world filled full of strange creatures, robots, bandits, survivors, and remains of military groups. For a free and unfinished game, it's actually quite amusing to play.

Part of what makes it interesting is the AI system, which the developer mentions uses dynamic behaviour trees that they wrote a piece on a few years ago. It actually feels a little like Project Zomboid, with the Zombies being replaced by a lot more variety.

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With a nicer UI, it could be something but for now considering it's free and fun to explore and survive in it's easily worth a look as it costs nothing other than time and you might find something you love. A huge world to explore, lots of variety in the encounters, some fun weapons, a crafting system and you can play it alone in single-player or online with others. Lots to like about it.

Find it free on the official site .

Free, open source and actually really good - Widelands was originally inspired by The Settlers II and they've confirmed their plans for a big release this year.

Back in July 2020, Widelands Build 21 went out which pulled in lots of big improvements and made it much more worthwhile spending time with. After that, the team working on it continued hacking away and in the latest announcement it was a "golden time for development, with numerous new features added and swarms of bugs fixed" and so "the era of the Widelands beta build releases has come to an end, and the first-ever stable release Widelands 1.0 will be released this summer".

To ensure the Widelands 1.0 release is good to go they will enter Feature Freeze in March, which means no new features will enter the code to ensure they can then focus on fixing up bugs.

I remember spending absolutely tons of hours playing the original Settlers on an Amiga, and much later Settlers II on a PC. Widelands brings back plenty of good gaming memories and it's a really relaxing game to play through, as you build up and expand your settlement across the map. Multiple game modes to suit different players, including endless and peaceful modes if you wish to just keep building with no interruptions.

See more on the Widelands website . You can find downloads here .

Zachtronics are well known for their excellent puzzle games which often sneak in some form of solitaire, this time around though they've put out a full solitaire style game you play online with friends in NERTS! Online.

"Unlike the rest of our solitaire games, we did not invent Nerts. We learned about it from our artist Kyle, who has played it for years, and started playing it after lunch in the Zachtronics office. Over time we added more to it, including house rules, longer tournaments, and even a theme song."

"When we started working from home in early 2020 we made a rough version of the game to play over the internet, which eventually (nine months later) was cleaned up and turned into this. Now you can play it on Steam for free!"

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It's properly free too, no special strings attached. Although, you do unlock cosmetic card backs by owning their other games but it's a tiny bit of fluff they say to "pretend that's a legitimate monetization strategy".

Sadly it's a little on the limited side in that you can only play with Steam Friends and people you're also in a Steam Chat with. They mentioned you can join the Steam Chat for the game to find others on the Community Hub where it says something like "24 in Group Chat".

You can find NERTS! Online free on Steam .

After a year in development on the latest update, the brilliant puzzle game b.i.t.Lock is now not only free but Petorio also added a Linux build too.

B.i.t.Lock is a game about fitting shapes into slots by moving around blocks on the screen. Sounds simple right? Wrong. All the blocks you have move at the same time, together and you need to push them around into walls to get them into the right place. It's challenging, makes you really carefully think and it's just such a well-made puzzle game that's definitely worth looking at.

You navigate these blocks through six different worlds with their own themes and mechanics and free the world bit by bit with each level solved. Each world has its own style of gameplay and requires different ways of thinking to solve the puzzles.

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With the latest update adding in a Linux build (which works great), it also added in Steam Workshop support with a built-in level editor, new music tracks, a bunch of new sound effects to make the game feel a bit more alive and lots of other little adjustments.

One of the additions in particular in this update I liked is the newly shown steps taken when you complete a level, with each movement being a step. One level took me well over 100, oh my. I'm not very good at it, clearly, but it is a lot of fun to play through.

Find B.i.t.Lock free on Steam .

After some classic first-person shooter fun? Developer 'Scumhead' who works with the GZDoom game engine recently announced that Shrine, Lycanthorn and Lycanthorn II all now have Linux builds.

This makes grabbing them and playing them easier than ever, no need to mess about with setting up GZDoom manually or moving anything around. Currently it's only on itch.io but hopefully the Linux builds will hop over to Steam too sometime soon. Shrine is quite highly rated too, one we've talked about briefly here before when running it as a standalone.

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Shrine is a really well made total conversion, where you battle a "nightmarish eldritch horde as Tusk, the skinless monstrosity" across nicely designed levels full of unique and strange weapons. If you do love classic Doom, Hexen and so on this is probably something you should check out with 16 challenging levels to explore.

Check them all out here if you love your FPS games:

• Shrine
• Lycanthorn
• Lycanthorn II

The best part? They're all free to play but you can support the developer on their Patreon .

If you love classic 2D RTS games like Warcraft 2 and other similar titles, Wyrmsun is one you should take a look at because not only is it free and open source but it's seeing major upgrades too.

Their original plan to move to Godot Engine didn't work out, so they decided to stick with the classic Stratagus engine which it was originally based on. Instead, they continued enhancing what's was possible with what they already had including some substantial tech improvements including a 2x scaling option, improved pathfinding performance, parallel sound loading to improve loading times, mini-map zooming and more.

Lots of gameplay enhancements were also added in Wyrmsun 4.0 like a smarter AI that will now try to aid its buildings under attack, the AI will try to actually complete its quests and it only declares war during scenarios after 20 minutes so main quests go a bit smoother.

A number of art updates also went into the 4.0 release like Germanic buildings getting snowy variations, Copper, Silver, Gold, Iron, Mithril and Coal Deposits and Mines now have snowy variations, building town halls over settlement sites now possesses two additional (generic) construction frames and more snowy variations to other buildings. There's also a new Latin Dock, Elven Town Hall, Stronghold, Farm and Barracks buildings.

Pretty huge upgrade overall for a great FOSS RTS.

You can grab it free and keep it up to date on Steam with more info and source code links on the official site . Currently the 4.0 update on Steam has only been updated for Windows, the Linux update is to come a bit later. You can grab it yourself on Linux from GitHub until the Steam package is up to date again. The developer has a few simple paid DLC or donations to support their work.