Battle for Wesnoth is a completely free, feature-complete, very popular turn-based strategy game available for Linux. With Wesnoth 1.12 on its way (the second beta was released just a few days ago), Wesnoth benefits of a large, dedicated community and an active development. This is definitely a game which I love and occasionally play for a long time now.

Currently in Beta, Wesnoth 1.12 will bring groundbreaking new features:

A few hours ago, an announcement has been made on the Wesnoth Forums, announcing the introduction of the new WesGold accounts. Here’s what the mighty WesGold users will benefit of:

• Color formatting in posts and signatures!
• Increased signature size limits up to 1000 characters and 10 lines!
• Animated avatars up to 1 MiB/200×200 in size!
• New BBCodes!
• The ability to lock, unlock, and delete their own forum threads, even after others have posted in them!
• Unlimited thread resurrections in all forum sections, even if they are not the thread’s author!
• Advanced post search options powered by Google’s Enterprise Search platform!
• Full WML validation and syntax highlighting in posts!
• One-click integration with social media: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, Reddit, Windows, and more!
• A more dynamic forum experience leveraging the power of HTML5, CSS3, and AJAX!

And this is not all :) It looks that if you get banned from the forums, you can be unbanned by paying a fair amount of $50.

If I recall correctly, last year the project leaders were determined to hire some “real programmers and artists”. If I come to think about it, animated banners for the signature of “premium” users wouldn’t even be such a bad idea, even if it probably goes against the guidelines the Wesnoth project is following. This is pretty nice news for an April Fools’ prank, you can follow the discussion on the forum thread.

On a more serious note, Wesnoth 1.12 Beta looks very good, with some huge interface changes, redesigned add-ons manager, improved lobby interface, a new faction called Khalifate, campaign changes and improvements, major scripting improvements, and other fixes. A full review will follow as soon as Wesnoth 1.12 is officially released.

In Wesnoth 1.12, you will be able to play with default factions, or choose the default era + the new Khalifate faction: