You might ultimately rely on search engines for the majority of your traffic, I don't see how you can justify using paid advertising, perhaps you can stick a banner on some smaller site for $10 a month, like from BuySellAds.com, you can use Facebook ads to do a bit of "branding" promotion, getting the name out there, you might pay a couple of dollars for 1000 impressions. I think I have seen collections of Flash games adapted to work on Facebook that you could have link to your forum.

Toward getting search ranking one has to have backlinks from mainly related sites or pages, some of the easiest to get include blog comments and posts on other forums, after you have developed the rep. that allows you to add signatures that stick.

Forums are one of those user generated content sites that have trouble initially getting off the ground, almost no one wants to be the first one to post on such a site, some professional site developers or flippers will use paid participants or posts scraped from other forums. You might do a web search for: forum scraper script, there will be some discussions of these scripts on forums as well as custom script orders on freelance marketplaces.

Here is one of many pages that give you some free exposure:

http://www.website-posting.com/

Simply post your website and maybee some of the next visitors that will post there finds your site intresting.

A link to your site can also make your site gain Page Rank and more of that gives your site better position in search engines like Google.

Also, here is one of some forums that allow members to market their own sites and products in the "advertising" section:

http://moneyforum.suddenlaunch.com/index...

Dear Promoter:

Tell everyone you know and talk to about your site, and have your friends do the same. Soon you will see results.

Sincerely,

B.A.S.S.

facebook page, twitter, yahoo answers-(gaming, internet section), gaming forums, backlinks.

use your friends network on facebook, twitter, tumbler, pinterest to spread around the word.

Hi i have just started a Gaming site with my friend, and I want to know ways on how to promote my site, preferably free. Any suggestions will be welcomed.

It is http://www.villagegaming.co.uk/

Check it out :D