Barbarians Now Available for MS-DOS

Saturday, 18th October 2025

Barbarians, a simple strategy game originally released on Psion handheld computers before being ported to the ZX Spectrum, has now been ported to another platform: MS-DOS.

In Barbarians, you play the part of the ruler of an ancient land. Your domain is being invaded by barbarians, and your task is to raise armies and drive them out of the country. The empire has twelve cities, which are ready to provide material resources and troops to help repel the barbarian hordes, and there are merchants with whom you can trade goods and gold to maintain your economy.

The game was originally designed in 2010 for the Psion Organiser II, an 8-bit handheld computer with between 8 and 64 kilobytes of RAM, and a small text display with redefinable characters. In the same year the game was ported to the Psion Series 3, Series 5, and a number of compatible devices. In 2012 the game was ported to the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. Its simplicity allowed it to run effectively on the 16k model.

Over a decade later, the game has been ported to MS-DOS for the DOSember Game Jam. As with the other games on this site, Barbarians runs on a PC with an 8088 CPU and CGA graphics, and uses the internal PC speaker for music and sound effects. The game also runs fine in DOSBox.

You can download the game and its manual using the links below, or from the Barbarians page on this site.