Most home internet cannot accept inbound game traffic. Connect hosts the room on a public server. Every player connects out. No port forwarding, no "host migration," no hoping someone's NAT cooperates.
Some games never had a server to host. They look for friends on the local network and stop there. For those, Connect puts your whole party on one shared network instead, so a LAN session works from four different houses.
Start a party, pick a supported game, hit Join Game. Connect starts the dedicated server and drops everyone in.
For LAN-only games. Your party shares one private network, and the game's own discovery finds everyone on it.
Browse live community servers for dozens of titles — the same catalog, a different path than a private party room.
We coordinate the party. Their network stays theirs. Presence, ready-up, and launch — not a PlayBound relay.
These titles get a PlayBound dedicated room when your party clicks Join Game. A couple still need an in-game join step — Hedgewars takes the address from its own menu. Everyone else is launched straight into the room.
These games have no server to host and no address to type. They find friends by looking around the local network, which normally means everyone has to be in the same building. Connect gives your party a private network of its own, so "the same building" can be four different houses.
Click Join Game in your party, then in the game:
The launcher sets the network up and points the game at it. The steps above are the part that happens inside the game, where we cannot click for you.