Hi,
for those of you BoardGameGeeks i have a suggestion.
I am a long time member of
http://www.brettspielwelt.de (BoardGamesWorld).
BSW is a site where you can play online and FREE many original boardgames. From Settlers of Catan, over Pandemic to Dogz and whatnot. All the games are licensed with the original publishers and so they look relatively genuine (original graphics, gameplay and rules). The publishers count the BSW as a kind of advertisement for their games. And it worked for me. When i joined the BSW i played Pandemic the first time. I loved it so much that i purchased the game as a board game -> DANG! Money for the publisher via BSW. :)
In BSW there is a Metagame that is organized in a kind of "World" with towns and Guilds and Ranks/Levels. So you can go from town to town where games in "houses of the town" are offered to play. Lounges and shouts makes it easy to find opponents. Also there are a lot of people around all the day and 24/7. At the time i write this post 1200+ players were online.
Regular tournaments and events completes the scenario. The Metagame is a nice addon, but not the main thing. If you register you can get a citizen of a town and play for this town in tournaments and earn money for the town (that is needed to purchase food, pay tax and whatnot). Or you just enter, wade to the game you want, play some matches and walk away again. It's at your will.
Oh and did i mentioned its completely FREE. You even don't need to register. You can play as Guest. But then you miss a lot of fun of rankings and levels. But even if you register, i never got a single email from them, except the register/welcome one.
Don't be afraid that this is a german page and the homepage is all german. There are a lot of foreign (non german) members there and english spoken is BSW-wide from a lot of persons there. There are even founded towns in the BSW-Metagame with english speaking or regional persons (e.g. London for British people or Istanbul for Turkish).
E.g. there is a special forum board for english only at:
BSW English ForumSo maybe we meet you some times in the world of BSW. My nickname (What do you think? Surprise, Surprise!) is of course not JoTo. :) Was already taken. I am Lukullus there.
Hope this suggestion is valuable for someone.
Greetings
JoTo