Battle for Wesnoth - a turn based tactics game in a fantasy setting. It's also available on Steam and itch.io. Coincidentally, version 1.18.0 was released yesterday.
Right now I'm basically playing Beyond All Reason almost every evening. It's a game in the Total Annihilation "tree" of games. A massive scale RTS. I previously played Supreme Commander and Planetary Annihilation, both of which are also inspired by Total Annihilation, but I have to say that BAR is really better than both of them. I almost can't believe it's an open source game. It's still in alpha, but it's been way more stable than most AAA games I've been playing recently.
Endless sky. You start off with a single spaceship and fly around the galaxy trading, fighting pirates, and buying/capturing more ships. The devs are still regularly adding new content too.
Does DOOM count? It's been officially open sourced recently, even though it was already treated as such for decades.Either way, I can't stop playing it, there's 30 years of user created content to go through.
In my AP Computer Science class in high school, every now and then our teacher would give us a free day. We would sit around playing Unreal Tournament on the LAN.
At one point the teacher decided he wasn’t comfortable with a game with guns in class.
So…I got everyone to install Cube, the open source first person shooter. Specifically a copy of it where I had removed all of the gun models. So we just ran around punching and bullets would fly from our fists. Or, in the case of the rocket launcher, an exploding sofa would fly from our fists.
I don’t know if I would call it my favorite, but we had a lot of fun with it.
Nethack. I remember playing it at university 30 years ago when it was text only. Amazingly, there is a version available for android and its fucking addictive.
One of my favorites recently has been playing MineClone2 with some extra mods (can't remember which) through Minetest.
I've been boycotting minecraft since the news of chat reporting potentially coming to Java and MineClone2 is such a good replacement. Biggest gripe I have is not being able to get any of the mods that add sprint to work. Pretty much the only feature not available in MineClone2 (as far as I'm aware) from minecraft that I actively miss.
More recently, I'm a fan of shapez (shapez.io) for my recommended daily allowance of factory building gaming.
Going back further, I have a soft spot for Ri-li, a nice little game about toy trains with very charming music! It was this which set me on an adventure with the mod tracking scene. A surprising amount of open source games use them, it feels like open source music!
Doom, or, gzdoom! You can use it to play the original Doom 1 and 2 games with modern mouse and keyboard controls on HD displays. And there's an endless number of fan made level packs to try.
As for open source AND free / open resources, there's Freedoom 1 and 2. I occasionally play them, they're fun, but a little lacking in stage design.
I like Simutrans, which is basically an OpenTTD competitor with more complexity but an uglier interface. Sadly development on it has been fairly slow, at one point there was a one-way road patch but it’s since been abandoned.
Star Ruler 2, the company closed down and open sourced the game, it's a space 4X real time, has pretty good fleet combat and u can design ships, i think wasn't popular because the resource management and card system is a bit weird and harder to understand than other strategy games, but pretty fun after u get used to it...
There are a lot of great responses on here! I've been playing (at least until my steam deck shit the bed two days ago) around with OpenRA and Minetest.
I hate that Tales of Maj'Eyal is my favorite Open Source game. I hate that a new expansion is coming out soon and I will instantly buy it and play it and hate myself. Check it out!
Mine would be Thrive, not so much due to its current gameplay, though it is okay, but moreso due to an unwavering commitment to a vision. It has gone on for years and is essentially a scientifically close to accurate version of spore. They have almost finished the single cell stage and are working some on the transition to multicellular now as I understand it.
I find it to be an impressive project as it started from the disappointment with spore and has evolved into something that I would genuinely suggest as a learning tool in middle school biology class.
Xonotic is really fun if you enjoyed Quake 3 and Unreal. Has an active community as well. Beyond All Reason is a pretty polished RTS using Spring engine.
Project 1999 and Project Quarm. Emulators of EverQuest, which was released in 1999. Official EverQuest is still going strong 25 years later, but the emulator developers (the are several projects) have an agreement to run their versions of the game.
I'm playing Project Quarm version now and spend way too much time on it.