Space Merchant
In this game you start as a small merchant with nothing but a crappy spaceship that is useless for anything other than running a trade route.  But as you get more experience and more money you will be able to buy bigger better ships with more firepower, more cargo space so you can earn more money on your trade routes and faster ships so you get more turns per hour.  You can establish a home planet for yourself or your guild.  You can buy bigger better weapons, buy drones to protect your planet and trade routes.  Basically the possibilities are endless.  The only thing I dislike about this game is that you are given so many turns that it takes a lot of time to play them all each day and when you start out you really dont have many options as to what you can do.  But if you have enough time to dedicate to this game and are willing to spend the first week or so running trade routes barely surviveing then you will get a lot of enjoyment out of this game.

Stelar Crisis
This is a turn based game in which you start out as the leader of a new space age planet.  As the game progresses you gain technology and territory.  But you will also run into other players who will either want to take over your territory or form an alliance with you.  This game has an unusual format.  The closest thing I can compare it to is Space Merchant but the game itself is very different from Space Merchant.  There are different versions of the game you can choose to play and different types of games you can play.  You can play speed games where you get one turn every minute or you can play many month long games in which you get one turn every day or two.  You can play in as many games as you want so you will not become bored playing only one turn a day.  Since this game is so unique I would suggest everyone at least try it and if you don't like it you only lose an hour or two but if you do like it you will get a lot of enjoyment.

Happy Puppy
This site is a gamers delight.  It is essentially a very good free online gaming magazine that is updated daily with everything from reviews to hints to demos.  This is just the site for the little kid in all of us.

Earth: 2025
Probably the most popular free web-based game.  You get to run a country in a post-apocolyptic world as you vie to be the most powerful in the world.  I would rate this game as the most addictive and strategy intense games I have ever played for free or not.  This game is run by Echelon Entertainment an excellent site in its own respect.

Utopia
Anouther free web-based game by Echelon Entertainment.  This one takes place in a fantasy world in which you choose your race and build a province around your races strengths and weaknesses.  There are many interesting features about this game that set it appart from other free web-based games such as the idea of  kingdoms which are collections of provinces ruled by one elected president.  This game was designed more for the kind of person who enjoys roleplaying and fantasy than just strategy and diplomacy.

Kickass
A website dedicated to giving out free demos of computer games.  It is not updated often but you can probably find two or three interesting games to download there.

TEQ
A clone of the game Earth: 2025 but lately has been implimenting more and more unique features.  Some people believe it to be a superior game to Earth but it does not have the massive player base that Earth has.  The majority of the TEQ players are experienced Earth players so dont expect this game to be easy.