Legend of the Red Dragon (LoRD), Solar Realms Elite and Barren Realms Elite, and Tradewars were the best.

When I want to learn a new programming language, I always try to recreate Tradewars in it as a language. I know Tradewars like the back of my hand, so it allows me to focus on the nuances of the language while I build it. Such a fun project. The only thing I never quite figured out were the economics mechanics (it technically works, but it's a bit more predictable than TW2002 has in practice) and the Big Bang algorithm (I came up with my own, it's fine, but it doesn't have quite the same feel to it).

Less often, I'll try to create SRE/BRE, which, again is very fun but hard to reverse engineer. Amit (creator) lost the source code years ago, but wrote up some notes here: http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~amitp/Articles/SRE-Desi...

Funny, I just googled SRE/BRE to find the notes, and my last comment about it on HN was one of the top Google results... It's truly a lost art!

I loved BRE and LoRD so much. I would dial into like five BBS to play my turns every day.

My first close friend group from high school were actually from BBS Meetups more than school buds. When we found a crossover it was really weird!

Same!

I miss QWK. Best messaging format.

So much so that for several years I used a QB program I'd written to convert emails into QWK so I could use OLX to interact with emails. I'd reply using it and then convert my replies to plain text so I could send it off.

I still have taglines on all my emails.

BlueWave had that annoying "Ride the BlueWave!" default tagline, though. It might have been the progenitor of the plague of "Sent from my Blackberry/iphone" spamminess a few decades later...

Becoming a point (or even a private node) was the more hardcore option - running a mailer and tosser to exchange bundles of mail with your upstream node using protocols like WaZoo and the gloriously-named YooHoo/2U2.

I was a point in Net250 for a while. I was a private node on another network (whose name currently escapes me).

I was a big fan of msged on my Net 115 point. https://github.com/jrnutt/msged

BinkleyTerm was another favorite of mine, but I'm not sure of this version's lineage: https://sourceforge.net/p/btxe/code/