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If Scrabulous sets a bad precedent... What about BrettSpielWelt, a German program (available in English) which allows you to play dozens and dozens of the best board games to come out of that unlikely mecca of gaming.

There are also some major sites that have online Go on them, such as Yahoo and BoardGameWorld. But yeah, I have the feeling most of the professional players are at Pandanet.co.jp.

Also, by visiting wikipedia, I found a link containing lots more info to help you out http://www.boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/3662/

Hopefully that will take care of everything for you.

The good news part 1: In addition to Settlers of Catan, you can play 62 other games.

The good news part 2: There is a web client so that you can play on virtually any platform.

The good news part 3: There are platform specific clients for Windows, Mac, and Linux so that you can have a better UI than in the web client.

The good news part 4: It's all free.

You want to play modern board games online? Go to BrettSpielWelt. Free, online playing of over a hundred boardgames. Not only Settlers of Catan and Carcassonne, but also Caylus, Citadels, Medina, Power Grid, Princes of Florence, Puerto Rico, Ra, San Juan, and many, many, many more. The language to use is English at most of the site. Warning: there are many very strong players there, so prepare for a humiliating defeat at your favorite game.

Compare Hasbro's behavior on this matter to what german boardgame companies do about online boardgames. Websites likeBSWlet you play dozens of boardgames, using the original rules and art, at no cost and without any ads. Why? playing boardgames online is a poor subsitute to playing face to face. Many people, me included, like to visit websites like this to try the games out. If the game is any good, I buy the game to play at social gatherings with my friends. Who is not going to buy a scrabble board because you can play online?

Some companies, like Days of Wonder, let you play their games for free in their own website!. Hasbro should learn from this, and enter into a license agreement with eScrabble. For example, let the site use the trademark in exchange of having eScrabble link promintently to the Hasbro online store, where users could by a RL version of Scrabble. This kind of agreements are not unheard of, and only help both parties.

The easiest way to play Settlers of Catan on Linux is to try out an online java game such as http://settlers.cs.northwestern.edu/, http://catan.jsettlers.com/ or http://www.brettspielwelt.de/.

Is there any advantage to playing this over the version at BSW? BSW is free, has a great community, AND you get to learn German while gaming. How can you beat that?

You can play a lot of those games online at BrettspielWelt, though I'm not sure how many have the complete rules available.

Firefox (Mozilla), JAVA 1.4.1

But, this time I checked the FAQ. They've also got a downloadable client, and it works more or less (machine froze during 1st install, ok on 2nd install, no chat window on first run, has chat window on 2nd run). Off to deciphiring the boards it is.

This is a much better boardgame portal. You need to configure it to use english instead of german (if that's your language of choice), but it has a great community and lots and lots of german board games. If you aren't familiar with classic titles like Saint Petersburg, Puerto Rico, and Carcassone, you should really check it out. These games have been beautifly adapted to the java interface, so anyone can play with any OS with java support.

The german style of boardgame is interesting. The games are under an hour, you may be down, but you're never out, and it'll be your turn soon. The are easy to learn but hard to master. Unlike the American designers, the germans don't like direct conflict or random chance. Instead, there's a lot of resource denial and bidding strategy.

Brettspeilwelt has a metagame that advances players in rank. Experienced players have more control over games, and can build game rooms of their own. Generally, playing space, in terms of server resources is optimally allocated this way. There's a lot of prestige in offering the new game and so forth. Also, the Germans are very polite gamers. No cussing or racial slurs, just "good luck and have fun" type comments. If you like boardgames like Settlers, this is the place to be.

Roborally - Program a robot (the best game ever)

Puerto Rico - Kinda fun, (Requires curl)

Brettspielwelt - many games including catan in german.

The german site www.brettspielwelt.de has a lot of java games, but the user interface is slightly complicated.

I didn't know the games there were a secret. :)

There's also Carcasonne ("CC"), Lost Cities, Go, Puerto Rico, etc, etc.

I hope I'm not inviting a hard slashdotting if they can't take it, but it sure would be nice to have a few more players on there with some regualrity :)

Hopefully in the future we will see some real and high quality computer versions of Puerto Rico, Tigris and Euphrates and all the other great board games most people have never heard of.

Theres a decent set of board games on BrettspielWelt, except its primarily a German site. They have Peurto Rico, Settlers, Carcassonne, and a mess of others. It could use a lot more players though...

see here: http://www.brettspielwelt.de/gate/jsp/base/index.j sp?nation=en

The legality is uncertain, but brettspielwelt has Settlers and lots of other popular boardgames in a thriving community, with ~ 500+ people online at any given time.

Board games rule! If you have other sufficiently geeky board game friends, it can be way more fulfilling than your usual FPS, racing game, etc.

I suggest checking out Board Game Geek, it's truly an awesome site. Of particular interest, the games considered the best by the BGGs are here.

There's also a German board game WORLD of sorts where you can play a heck of a lot of board games online. Check it out here.