So I feel there might be something wrong with my router. I have many LAN pc games that do not work. Take Minecraft for an example. Wifi works fine, I've done homesharing in the past, but if I try to play a game over LAN it doesn't work. We have my PC hooked up to my brother's laptop. We're just trying to play some games together. I tried following tutorials online but it just doesn't work. I did read something about port forwarding though. I'm new to PC gaming so I wouldn't know how to do all this. Any help duders?

Edit: We have them both connected to the same router.

How are you connecting the two machines? With a direct cable or to a switch or a router?

@MB: We have them both connected to the router.

There could be anything wrong with the setup of "We have my PC hooked up to my brother's laptop." Most modern NIC transceivers can do auto-sensing so you don't need "crossover cables" but one of the machines might be too old to handle that. Even given that, two machines don't start automatically communicating with each other just because there is a hard wired link. Do either NIC have the correct firewall configuration? Do either need additional configuration?

@EXTomar: By connected, I mean both to the same router. They are both fairly new. He bought his around a month ago and I got mine, I would say a year ago. I have tried adding the game to list of things allowed through the firewall but it doesn't work.

what kind of router are you using?

@Jams: It's a Cisco Linksys model WRT160N V3.

Edit: Here's a picture.

Looks like that except the positions of Linksys and Cisco are swap. I went cheap...

well, you could try turning off the windows firewall on both computers and see if it works then
 
if it does, then all you need to do is authorise the program in question correctly.
 
controllpanel>windowsfirewall> advanced settings > here you should find someting like "properties for windows firewall" klick that
 
and here you should have like 4 tabs, domain, private and public profile are the 3 first, go ahead and turn the firewall off for all 3 on both computers, reboot em, and see if minecraft/whatever game works.

@Devildoll: Thanks, I'll try that.

In case you run into any more issues.... here is a guide to "Port Forwarding" for your router..... This is standard procedure for fixing issues for playing games on a network through a router...

Link For Port Forwarding

@Devildoll said:

well, you could try turning off the windows firewall on both computers and see if it works then if it does, then all you need to do is authorise the program in question correctly. controllpanel>windowsfirewall> advanced settings > here you should find someting like "properties for windows firewall" klick that and here you should have like 4 tabs, domain, private and public profile are the 3 first, go ahead and turn the firewall off for all 3 on both computers, reboot em, and see if minecraft/whatever game works.

This worked for me! How can I configure firewall correctly?

 @SexyToad: 
  tired to find a good way to explain it, this will probably do