Games like Torn City: the honest list for 2026

Torn launched in November 2004 and became the largest text-based MMO of its kind: a persistent crime city with an energy bar, a stat grind, a player-run market and factions. People look for alternatives for a few honest reasons — a twenty-year-old economy is a hard place to start, the interface is a museum of its own history, or they simply want a smaller city where the names in chat are people they recognise.

This is the list, including the games that are better than this one at some things. If you want the short version: nothing replaces Torn at Torn's own scale, and that is usually not what people are actually after.

First, decide which kind you want

Almost every game below sits on one side of three lines, and knowing which side you want narrows the list faster than any review.

• Persistent or round-based. A persistent game never resets — what you built in March is still there in November, and so is everyone else's lead. A round-based game wipes every few weeks and starts everyone level. Persistent rewards patience; rounds reward intensity, and forgive you for missing a year.
• Is PvP optional. In some crime games any player can attack you at any time and that is the point. In others, combat is something you opt into. Neither is wrong, and it is the single fastest way to be miserable in the wrong game.
• Who sets the prices. If the shops are run by the game, the economy is a faucet. If the market is run by players, the economy is a place other people are also trying to make money in — which is most of the long game in Torn, and the reason its market is the feature people miss first.

Torn

The incumbent, and still the best version of itself. Persistent, enormous, free with paid perks, browser plus native apps. Two decades of features, two decades of interface, and an economy where the top of the ladder is very far up. If you have never played it, play it — the rest of this list makes more sense afterwards.

Bootleggers

The same shape — energy-gated crimes, gym training, families, PvP — moved to Prohibition-era Chicago, with bootlegging and speakeasies doing the work the modern-day setting does elsewhere. Worth it if the 1930s flavour is the part you want.

Gangster Nation

Running since 2005, text-based, and unusual among its peers for taking phones seriously — it ships native apps alongside the browser version. If the thing keeping you from a crime RPG is that you only ever have ten minutes and a phone, start here or with the city below.

The round-based mafia games

The Mafia Boss and the Omerta-descended games work differently: the world runs for a fixed span, everyone races, and then it wipes. That makes them a genuinely different hobby. You cannot fall behind permanently, and you cannot build anything permanent either. For a lot of people who bounced off Torn because the leaderboard was unreachable, this is the actual answer.

Achaea, and the MUDs

Not a browser crime game, but the family these games came from, and Achaea has been running since 1997. If what you like about Torn is the text and the persistence rather than the crime, the MUDs are deeper at both. They ask more of you up front.

MeowStreets

The one you are reading. A free persistent browser crime RPG where every player is a street cat in one shared city: 12 crimes across 3 districts, stats trained with energy, 20 courses that finish while you are away, a player-run market, crews, cooperative heists and bounties.

What is actually different, rather than what every game on this list claims: the entire rule set is public and generated from the running game. Every payout, every success rate, every price on the handbook is compiled straight out of the tables the server plays from, so it cannot be out of date and it cannot be flattering. You can read what each crime pays and how often it fails before you make an account.

It is also small and new, which is the trade. There is no twenty-year economy to catch up with, and there is no twenty-year economy. If you want the biggest city, it is Torn. If you want one where you will recognise the names, it is this one.

Where to start

If you are new to the whole genre, read what a PBBG is first — it explains why these games ask for ten minutes a day rather than an evening. If you are reading this on a phone, the mobile page is the more useful one. And if the cat is the part that caught your eye, that is its own story. Otherwise: open the city. It is free, it runs in this tab, and it installs to a phone home screen.