Vassal is a game engine for building and playing online adaptations of board games and card games. You can use Vassal to play in real time over the Internet or by email. Vassal runs on all platforms and is free, open-source software.
Thousands of boardgames have been converted for use with Vassal, so there's a good chance that you'll find the games you own in our module library already. If there is not yet a Vassal module for your favorite game, you can use the Vassal Editor to build your own module, and should you run into trouble, help is only a click away in our forum.
Vassal runs on Linux, MacOS, Windows, and any other system which has Java.
Vassal 3.5 and later require Java 11 or later. The MacOS disk image and the Windows installer come with the version of Java Vassal will use. For Linux and other operating systems, install Java before running Vassal.
Visit our downloads page for information about downloading all releases.
Source code for Vassal is available on GitHub.
Need help using Vassal? Stuck while creating a module? If you can't find an answer in our extensive documentation, check our friendly forum for help.
For problems with the website, email the webmaster. For problems with mail, email the postmaster.
The Vassal project is run by volunteers and progresses through the efforts of volunteers. Is there a feature you'd like to see in the next release? Did you find a bug? Request that feature or report the bug here. Are you a programmer? We could use your help. Join us in the developers' forum. Not a programmer? Help us improve our documentation.
Vassal is free, open-source software, created by volunteers. While Vassal is free, development and hosting are not. If you enjoy using Vassal, please consider helping us with these costs.
Vassal is released under GNU Lesser General Public License, version 2.1 or later.
Licenses for Vassal's dependencies may be found here.
Website content (except game modules) is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (cc by-nc-sa) license.
All products mentioned on these pages are trademarks of their respective owners, where appropriate.
Vassal began life as Virtual Advanced Squad Leader (VASL) in 1996, written by our founder Rodney Kinney. VASL was for playing Advanced Squad Leader only, but its promise as a general virtual tabletop was obvious and by the end of 2002, Vassal was born and VASL transformed from a standalone program into one of many modules for Vassal.
Many people have contributed code or documentation to Vassal (and to VASL before that):
We've striven to keep a complete list, but with 25 years of project history spread across CVS, Subversion, and now Git… it's possible that we've missed someone. If you should be on this list, let us know.