nobleheart: don't quote me on this, but i think you can put just about any old game online as long as you don't use any trademarked or copyrighted terms to refer to it. like battleboats: if Fencer called it "Battleship", he would have been served with a cease-and-desist order by now, and had to remove it from the site - if he didn't have to take the whole site down as a result. but because he didn't call it "Battleship," it is (as far as i know) fully legal. bugcafe.net refers to their word game that bears an uncanny resemblance to Scrabble as "bugwords" and they continue to chug along fine, while e-scrabble.com met with a rather different fate...and a damn shame, too, because e-scrabble.com was the best form of that game ever available online.

i think if you never refer to a game by its trademarked name or any other protected reference, and maybe if you change one minor rule or two just a little to be on the safe side, you should be alright. but i'm no lawyer...