Kurnik

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Kurnik (Polish: Chickencoop) is a community-supported website of classic board and card games to play online against live opponents in real-time. It was created in 2001 by Marek Futrega, and was initially a Polish-only website. As of early 2005 it supports over 30 board and card games and the site is available in over 20 languages. The gaming platform is still actively developed by Futrega.

The website was originally Polish-only and is the most popular on-line board game website in Poland. The site is available in 21 languages so far. Since October 7, 2004 all game rules at Kurnik's web pages are available under the Creative Commons attribution-noncommercial licence.

Other interesting technical solutions:

The live players are connected using Java applets. Hence the user only needs a Java -enabled browser.
The service collects extensive player statistics (excellent for avoiding cheaters) and maintains a complete archive of games played in the last 6 months. Games can be replayed or downloaded in popular formats (PGN, PBN, SGF and others).
Fully-automated online tournaments including private ones (organised by users).
Guest mode for observing a game from the side.

According to a gemiusTraffic research, in December 2004 the website was visited by 1.2 million unique users. The Polish version has about 100.000 registered users and, as of January 2007, an Alexa Internet ranking of around 1,200. ^[1]

Until 1 May 2002 Scrabble was also available at Kurnik, under the name Szkrable. After a threat of legal action from Cronix, the company with the rights to Internet versions of the game, Kurnik developed a similar game called "Literaxx" (Literaki ;-) in Polish), which differed from Scrabble only because of a different board, but Cronix considered these changes too minor for it not to be a copyright violation. Marek Futrega then developed Literaki ;-) into a new word-based game with different rules than Scrabble. The Literaki ;-) rules are public domain. Similarly, a free equivalent of Monopoly, "Blogpoly" (Netopol ;-) in Polish) is also available in the Polish version.

As of April 5th 2008 Kurnik.org changed its name to playok.com. All games and player statistics have remained unchanged despite the new name.

[edit] Dictionary

Kurnik is also a host for the biggest Free Software dictionary available for the Polish language. Collaboratively developed, it was initially meant to be just a tool to help validate moves in word-based games, but it subsequently replaced basically all other freely available dictionaries used in free software projects. The dictionary is dual-licensed under cc sa and the GPL.