after reinstalling my Mac I downloaded the new Version 0.7.3 and I'm sad to say, that it is really, really, really, really, really buggy. It suddenly dies, fails to render the menus, sometimes doesn't show what I loaded onto a ship, tells me that it's "not my turn" and skips my moves and so on and so on.
It's not the end of the world (most of the time you can still hit the "save" button) and still a cool game but if you've got 0.7.2 running DON'T UPDATE!!

I finally got thru a game session of FreeCol I like it. Much like it's cousin FreeCiv, this is an Open Source empire building game, but with a more elegant interface, and a slightly different focus. Free Col's game mechanics and visual design are closely modeled on Civilization 2 & 3, but the game revolves around colonizing the Americas, and declaring your independence from your home country. While there is documentation, it consists more of a feature list than actual instructions. There is no tutorial for the game -- I learned how to play FreeCol by playing a demo of Civilization 4 first, and realized that the game mechanics were the same. The menus in Mac OS 10.4 are a little glitchy -- they do not always render the commands from the pull down menus unless you are exactly over the text. The game plays and looks well, and I look forward to watching it grow.

Yeah I played this. It's pretty cool, like the original one.

Anyone play this yet? The interface looks pretty nice -- customized menus that only slightly betray their PC origins. I would be interested to see how this and FreeCiv turn out, as my young kids are curious, but not $50 curious to explore games like these.