We're here to help you separate the wheat from the chaff. What follows are some of the best free PC games you can get online. Our rules are simple:
- It must be an honestly free game. There are great free PC games that have paid "premium" options and those are fine, but we're going to steer clear from demos, or games that really can't be fully enjoyed without ponying up money.
- No utterly simple flash games. There's nothing wrong with those—we have wasted countless hours with Desktop Tower Defense and Nanaca Crash—but the Web is chock full of lists and portals to these games. Some of our games use flash, sure, but they're a little more upscale than your typical Kongregate offering.
- It has to run on modern Windows systems. There's a ton of "abandonware" out there that won't run on anything other than DOS or maybe Windows 3.1, and requires jumping through some major hoops to get it working. We want to keep it relatively simple.
Even following those rules, there's a lot of free gaming goodness out there…too much to cover. What use is a list of hundreds of games? Where do you start? These 20 games are among the cream of the crop, and every single one is worth downloading and giving some time to. You never know, you might just find your next big gaming addiction here, and not pay a dime for it! Puzzle Pirates Freeciv TribesNext Ikariam You're playing with other real people, so there is opportunity for diplomacy, trading, and armed conflict. You can spend real-world money to buy "Ambrosia" which you then exchange for increased resource gathering rates or advanced features that let you see more of your buildings at a glance, but the whole game is essentially playable for free. It's actually a fairly deep, yet accessible game that's quite easy to play without a lot of time investment.
One of the more popular free games on the 'net, Puzzle Pirates is a persistent MMO with a very casual bent. You create a cute pirate that looks like a Playmobil figure, and sail the seven seas in search of pieces 'o eight. The catch is, each activity (and there are many, from manning the guns to repairing the ship to bilging out water) is performed with a simple puzzle game. Everyone on the ship plays their puzzle at the same time, and the cumulative performance determines how well your ship does. There are tons of community features, lots of help and tutorials, tournaments, clans, etc. There is a money angle, though—you can play for free forever, but you can also purchase a subscription or buy doubloons to access more advanced features. 
It's Civilization, and it's free! Okay, so maybe this free and open-source strategy game "inspired by" the beloved Civ doesn't have all the nice UI features or pretty graphics of Civilization IV. Maybe Freeciv has more in common with Civ II than the modern entries in the series. Once you come to grips with the keyboard commands and the way the game presents information on research, diplomacy, and cities, it's really just as addictive as any other Civ game. Just…one…more…turn. 
Remember Tribes 2? There was still a hardcore community of players when Vivendi shut down the authentication and game list servers last year. Fortunately, there's TribesNext, a free patch to restore multiplayer functionality with a new free authentication server and lobby. Oh, and the game's free too, so you can just go download both the client and patch at the TribesNext site. What are you waiting for? Party like it's 2001!
Take control of a town on a small Mediterranean island in this browser-based strategy multiplayer game. The pace is leisurely to the point of being something you only need to check in on from time to time. Set your people to gather some resources and start construction on a new building or two, then check in on your little corner of the world in a few hours. Ikariam is built for this—close your browser window whenever and your workers continue to work, your researchers continue to research…you get the idea. 
