Thieves' Guild

Thieves' Guild is an online multiplayer BBS door game. In this role-playing title players explore a large medieval world with archaid language, combat, thievery and fantasy elements such as spellcasting. There are 25 different towns to explore. The gameplay is asynchronous with players given X amount of turns to play per day.

While the game seems to have a simple premise of being a thief on the hunt to loot as much as possible, it is in fact a meta-BBS game. The players' characters are cast as real-world BBS users who are transported through a vortex into a strange alternate realm. Upon arrival at Rogues' Isle, they are inducted into the titular guild by a mysterious Master Thief—and told that a portal back home exists somewhere, if they can find it.

Gameplay centers on exploring a world of interconnected towns, solving riddles, completing quests, navigating mazes, and stealing from (or fighting) other characters and townsfolk. While every town includes standard RPG locations like taverns, inns, and jails, most also feature one unique and often dangerous landmark—like the Temple of Balor, the Torture Chamber, or the Silver Pyramids.

Travel between towns is done by horse or boat, creating a light resource management aspect as players decide how best to allocate time and movement. The world operates on a semi-persistent multiplayer structure where players on the same BBS system may interact with shared progress. Despite its old-school interface, it features light competitive mechanics: the game resets when any player completes the final quest and escapes through the portal, with that player's name added permanently to the "Masters of Riddles" leaderboard.

Most of the information is conveyed through text and controls are done through text based menus. In 1993 an official graphical front-end was created with graphics for the game as well as sound clips and limited animation. The developers also offered a printed map to purchase. At a later time the game was also distributed as shareware to system operators who wanted to run their own server with a limited version of the game. Upon purchasing the full version they were sent a disk with the full game.