Rating:
www.talesofmonkeyisland.com

We had given up hope, mostly. True, it remained close to our hearts, but rarely at the forefront of our minds. Some fansites remained, although others had shut down for lack of material or purpose. And those in the know? They told us time and again to give up – there would be no more Monkey Islands.

Monkey Island represents a strange yet significant event in pirate history. Those of us who love pirates more than average; most of us would point to the Pirates of the Caribbean rides as the most influential element in our piratey formative years. This is a common experience we share across a wide age range – from the old to the young. But there exists a sliver of us – the piratey Gen Xers – that also largely fell in love with another piece of piratey pop-culture long before the floodgates were opened by the Disney films, and that was the 1991 videogame The Secret of Monkey Island. In many ways cutting edge at the time, today’s audience would likely view it as only a little better than Donkey Kong. [read more »]

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www.burningsea.com

Aye, I really should have reviewed this game some ages ago. Hell, it was only due to my participation as a DJ on the late YarRadio (official online station of Pirates of the Burning Sea) that Bilgemunky Radio ever came into being. And I’d spent a good amount of time on their beta - testing the waters, so to speak. But perhaps it was these very things that had my mind moving elsewhere by the time PotBS was released – my relationship with YarRadio had soured, and they’d pulled the plug on the station well before the game was even released. And though I’d learned much about the game, none of it was legally yet available for public consumption. And, lest we forget, the blasted game was in development for, what, five years? [read more »]

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www.pursuitofinfamy.com

Some pirate games are quite complicated – not only do you sail, but you also have to worry about swordfighting, minding your investments, replacing your old lame clothes with new, more piratey clothes, and so on. Not so with Buccaneer: The Pursuit of Infamy. This arcade style is quick and to the point – take your ship out, blow apart the enemy, and collect your reward. It’s a refreshingly simple concept that when combined with stellar graphics and rousingly piratey sound effects (not to mention music provided by Swashbuckle!) makes for a fine way to kill your real-world productivity. [read more »]

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www.piratesonline.com

Let’s face it, most of us don’t live the sort of lives that allow us to indulge our love of piracy – we don’t own sloops with cannons, we can’t walk around our neighborhoods with swords strapped to our hips, and so on. This is where Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMO) are such a wonderful modern creation. For those not familiar with the concept, an MMO is essentially an online world where you create a character and do whatever it is you wish you could be doing in real life. For people like us, this usually means looting and pillaging.

Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean Online is a relatively young MMO – it’s only been live for a few months and is still growing and developing to best suit the desires of its players. In it, you create a pirate character – male or female – and customize their look to suit your tastes. The characters are a little cartoony, with the menfolk being rather burely and the girls leaning towards the cutesy, but this works well enough considering that the game itself is a bit fantastic and cartoony, rather than attempting to mimick reality outright. [read more »]

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www.pieces-of-eight.com

There’s nothing like a game with physical substance. True, some of the best pirate games around consist of nothing more than cardboard and plastic, but there’s nothing quite like those few games that forgo these modern substances in favor of metal, wood, and glass.

Pieces of Ei8ht is a unique game in that it features no playing board, no cards, no dice – the only materials needed are an assortment of metal coins and a small velvet pouch. And while it might sound a trifle, there is nothing quite like hearing the jingle of these coins in their bag, the smack they make when dropped on the table, or the weight of them in your hand – these factors alone make the game so much more than it would otherwise have been. [read more »]

Rating:
www.wizkidsgames.com/pirates

That I’m only just now reviewing the Pirates Constructable Strategy Games (CSG) is just shameful. Not only has it been out for some years now, but what’s more, I’ve been picking up their ships from Walgreens since the beginning. I’d never actually played the game mind you, but grabbing a pack now and again and assembling the ships to display on my bookshelf was enough to give me a small thrill.

So there you have it – a game you don’t need to actually play to enjoy. But I can’t take the sole blame for not fully appreciating the Pirates CSG. Even their own publicity material admits to being unprepared for their warm reception amongst consumers – their initial game release, planned as a two year run – actually sold out a month BEFORE the official release. And their various themed series’ (Pirates of the Crimson Coast, Pirates of the Frozen North, Pirates of the Ocean’s Edge, etc. etc.) have left many at a loss to determine what to actually call the overall game (“That Pirate Game” seems to be popular, again according to publicity materials.) [read more »]

Rating:
www.bentcastle.com

No matter what your lot in life, there’s surely a deck of cards out there for you. This holds true even for us pirate-enthusiasts. And this is nothing new – Disney has long been making decks of cards based on Pirates of the Caribbean (both the movies and the ride), and there’s even a non-Disney deck floating around most novelty stores that features images from famous pirate woodcuts. The problem is, the Disney decks suck. And the other deck I mentioned – it’s decent, but nothing stellar. I want a pirate deck worth owning, and finally one has arrived.

Pegleg Pete’s Deck of Royal Rogues is a proper deck of cards – four suits, two jokers… the whole shabang. It was designed from the ground up, rather than from a normal deck with pirate images superimposed here and there – the suits are all the familiar clubs, spades, and whatnot – but rendered anew with a piratey flair. The face cards are all mirror imaged from top to bottom, just like a traditional deck, but instead of the line-drawn kings and queen, it’s skallywaggs and cutthroats ranging in emotion from amused to bloodthirsty. [read more »]

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www.frontporchclassics.com

By and large – and this isn’t necessarily a criticism – pirate tabletop games strive to emulate ship-to-ship combat, allowing players to travel between islands and blast cannons at each other. League of Pirates, however, takes a different approach.

Front Porch Classics has brought us some wonderful pirate games, with League of Pirates being from their new – more affordable – Discovery Edition line. In this game, two players face off to build their crews. Each has a board with openings representing crew vacancies, which they can fill with cardboard coins of quartermasters, mates, captains and the like. [read more »]

Rating:
www.frontporchclassics.com

Front Porch Classics has a reputation for tabletop games that are a) expensive as all hell and b) worth every penny. They bring an old world craftsmanship to their games that makes them virtual works of art, and playing them therefore seems to feel just a bit more authentic and worthwhile than it does when breaking out the more bourgeois Parker Bros variety. But alas, sometimes economy must outweigh art, and it’s in this vein that Front Porch Classics has introduced its Discovery Edition games. The quality of these sets remains high, but the metal and wood has largely been replaced with the more ordinary (and affordable) plastic and cardboard.

Dread Pirate: Buccaneer’s Revenge is the Discovery Edition’s direct answer to Old Century Dread Pirate (truly one of the most glorious pirate games on the market.) The play area and pieces are virtually identical in shape, if not material, with the only significant difference being the cards. In the Old Century version, the goal was to plunder towns and each other, and to end the game with the most booty – fairly straightforward. But Buccaneer’s Revenge has modified gameplay, sending players forth on a number of missions dictated by drawn cards. The ultimate goal is still to gather booty, and players can still bombard each other in combat, but the additional missions serve to add a bit more variety along the way. And what’s more, upon completing missions, players earn booty and skills that they can use in the future. [read more »]

Rating:
www.playlogicgames.com/aopct

I hate to be so blunt, especially with a game that I had hoped to love:

Age of Pirates: Caribbean Tales is an uncut diamond buried deep within a bottomless dung heap. It could have been great, it should have been great, but for whatever reason it was sent to market incomplete in most every respect, and is therefore not worth your hard-earned doubloons.

I’m an enormous fan of the original Seadogs. For all it’s quirks and bugs, it was still wonderfully fun, and easily set the standard for 3rd person pirate adventure games. Pirates of the Caribbean (Seadogs 2 before jumping on board with Disney) was also flawed – the last minute Disney changes seemed half-baked and disrupted the original intentions of the developers. But just the same, it was quite the improvement over Seadogs, and with the various mods created by fans it soon evolved into an ever-growing pirate world of near infinite options. [read more »]