This is the funniest and most addictive game you'll ever play—hilarious fun that you can enjoy anywhere, anytime. Hedgewars is a turn-based strategy game but the real buzz is from watching the devastation caused by those pesky hedgehogs with those fantastic weapons—sneaky little blighters with a bad attitude!

Each player controls a team of up to 8 hedgehogs. During the course of the game, players take turns with one of their hedgehogs. They then use whatever tools and weapons are available to attack and kill the opponents' hedgehogs, thereby winning the game.

To destroy your foes you can use one out of over 40 weapons! Launch bazookas or homing bees, drop mines, dynamite or explosive rubber ducks, throw grenades or watermelon bombs, poison them with stinky cheese, send them flying with a baseball bat, and much more!

Most weapons cause explosions that deform the terrain, removing circular chunks. Hedgehogs can die by drowning, being thrown off either side of the arena, or when their health is reduced to zero.

Hedgehogs may move around the terrain in a variety of ways, normally by walking and jumping but also by using particular tools such as the rope or parachute, to move to otherwise inaccessible areas. Each turn is time-limited to ensure that players do not hold up the game with excessive thinking or moving.

For complete beginners we recommend to play in singleplayer mode first. Start with the Basic Movement Training found in the training menu. Proceed with the other training missions. After completing the training, try to play some quick matches against the computer (also found in the singleplayer menu). Hedgewars has many weapons, so play a few matches to get a better feeling for them.

In-depth information about the game can be found online:

• https://hedgewars.org/start: Getting Started
• https://hedgewars.org/wiki.html: Hedgewars Wiki

The most important default controls are:

• Cursor keys: Walk and aim
• Mouse: Move camera
• Right mouse button: Open ammo menu
• Left mouse button: Select target or weapon
• Space bar: Shoot
• Left shift: Precise (this is a modifier key)
• Precise + Up/Down: Precise aiming
• Precise + Left/Right: Turn around without walking
• Hold down Precise: Prevent slipping on ice
• Enter: Jump
• Backspace: High jump
• Backspace ×2: Backjump
• Tab: Switch hedgehog (after activating the utility)
• 1-5: Set weapon timer
• F1-F10: Weapon shortcuts
• M: Mission panel / game mode information. Hold pressed to display, release to hide
• P: Pause, when playing offline, toggle automatic turn skipping when online
• Esc: Quit with prompt
• T: Chat
• U: Clan chat

For the full list, go to the Hedgewars settings. Also read the weapon tooltips for weapon-specific controls.

These are lesser-known controls of Hedgewars, they are based on your configured controls:

• Precise + Toggle hedgehog tags: Change visible hedgehog tags (team name/hog name/health)
• Switch + Toggle hedgehog tags: Toggle hedgehog tag translucency
• Precise + Toggle team bars + Switch: Toggle HUD
• Precise + Capture (screenshot key): Save current map + mask into Screenshot directory
• Precise + zoom in/out: Change zoom in smaller steps
• Precise + volume up/down: Change volume in smaller steps
• Precise + Reset zoom: Set zoom to 100% (instead of the zoom level in the settings)

For PC or Mac:

• Mouse and keyboard
• Monitor, minimal resolution 1024×768
• 200 MiB storage space
• Processor: 1 GHz (1 core is enough), 64bit recommended
• Video card: 250 MHz or so (any decent card from the year 2004 or later should do fine)
• 1 GiB RAM minimum
• Operating system: Windows Vista/7/8/10, GNU/Linux, macOS, FreeBSD, others

Hedgewars has been ported to other operating systems in the past. Check out https://hedgewars.org/download.html for the latest information.

Gamepads are supported partially (only in-game, not in the main menu).

See the INSTALL.md file.

Or see our wiki at https://hedgewars.org/kb/BuildingHedgewars.

Our main repository is located at https://hg.hedgewars.org/hedgewars/ using Mercurial as DVCS. A Git repository is also available (mirrored daily) at https://github.com/hedgewars/hw.

If you see a bug or have any suggestion please use the official bug tracker at https://hedgewars.org/bugs or the integrated feedback button.

If you want to help or get to know the sources better you can do that with some easy tasks from https://hedgewars.org/kb/TODO. We also have an extensive API in Lua to customize your adventures. See our wiki at https://hedgewars.org/kb/LuaAPI.

If you know your way through the code feel free to send a patch or open a pull request. The best Lua scripts get released in the official DLC page and later integrated in the next version.

This game is free software (“free” as in “freedom”). Source code is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public Licence version 2; images and sounds are distributed under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation Licence version 1.2. See the COPYING file for the full text of the licenses.

Copyright 2004-2018 Andrey Korotaev [email protected] and others. Click on the Hedgewars logo in the main menu and read the CREDITS text file for a more complete list of authors.

• Homepage - https://hedgewars.org/
• IRC channel - irc://irc.freenode.net/hedgewars
• Community forum - https://hedgewars.org/forum