I have tried searching and reading the first sseveral pages of results here but I'm not finding the answer to this issue stated clearly anywhere:

I would like to host a "LAN" game for myself and a couple of other people.

*I have double checked that I have ste up port fowarding on my computer (a WinXP machine) for 46631.

*Netstat shows me to be listening on 46631 when the hedgewars server is running.

*When I give my internet IP address out ... no-one can connect -- just constant "refused connection" responses on their end. I don't even see any attempt for them to connect on my end.

*Out of curiosity I also got them to run telnet to my IP and port 46631 and again, the connection was unsuccessul.

*My firewall is not blocking the port and even with the firewall completely disabled the same thing happens.

Any suggestions?

I don't like using the public server and then kicking peopel all the time. If I set the room option for "restrict joins" however, nobody can join - they get a message saying "joins restricted" and then can't enter the room :-/

This is starting ot get irritating - why is creating a simple private network game so hard?

Thanks in advance for any suggestions