How to connect

Every game listed here answers on a host and a port, and the protocol underneath is telnet — which in practice means a raw TCP connection with a small amount of optional negotiation on top.

telnet mush.pennmush.org 4201

That works, and on many systems it is already installed. It is also a poor way to play: the system telnet has no local echo control worth the name, no logging, no history, and it will mangle anything above ASCII. It is the right tool for checking that a game is up and the wrong one for spending an evening in.

What the address on a game page tells you

Each game page lists the endpoints we have measured, and marks any where TLS was observed. A game with a TLS port is a game you can connect to encrypted; the port number is usually different from the plain one.

Where a game has several ports, they are frequently the same world reached different ways rather than different games. We list what we measured and do not guess at which is canonical.

Choosing a client

The clients section has a page each, with a capability table. The three things worth checking before you install anything:

• Does it do UTF-8? If the game is not English-only, this will come up on your first evening.
• Does it do TLS? Only matters if the game offers it, but several now do.
• If you use a screen reader, does the project document support for it? This is the row most often missing from client comparisons, so it is the first row of ours — and where nobody has established an answer, it says unknown.

If nothing answers

A game that does not answer is not necessarily gone. Games move hosts, DNS lapses, and firewalls have opinions. This site keeps every game it has ever measured — including the ones that stopped answering years ago — and keeps knocking weekly, so the archive is the place to look before concluding anything.