Play These Scurvy Tabletop Games On Talk Like A Pirate Day
Pirate Borg offers a spooky set of the seven seas to sail.
Limithron
My favorite silly Internet holiday is Talk Like A Pirate Day. It takes place today, September 19th. While the classic pirate accent might bring up images of tall ships and walking the plank, it likely has a more modern origin.
In the 1950s, Disney made a pair of pirate movies which featured the same actor. Robert Newton played Long John Silver in Treasure Island and Edward Teach in Blackbeard the Pirate. The accent comes from those films which he based on a West Country accent that continued as he played similar roles on television.
What better way to celebrate Talk Like A Pirate Day than playing a game that puts players on the high seas? I’ve included a mix of tabletop games and role-playing games. Thanks to the publishers for sending along copies of these games for inclusion in this article.
Pirate Borg
MORK BORG is one of the most influential games of the past few years. Its striking design and simple mechanics have inspired dozens of game designers to use the concept for their own spin on a specific genre. They include common ones like vikings, cyberpunk and space horror but also unique settings like corporate America and police procedurals.
My favorite member of the Borg Family is Pirate Borg from Limithron. The game drops players into a Dark Caribbean full of deadly mermaids, undead fleets and Great Old Ones under the sea. Paired with an excellent naval combat system, the game stands out in the field as a fun gateway to naval horror and adventure.
Pirate Borg benefits from a very active community of fans and third party content producers. This fall there will be several huge expansions from the company after they ran a successful Kickstarter last year. The upcoming releases include a starter box, an expansion book and a collection of material produced by the community.
Rapscallion
Fans of Powered By The Apocalypse have an excellent choice for their own adventures on the sea. Rapscallion, from Magpie Games, offers high fantasy on the high seas. Players build their potential adventures together by choosing a personal playbook, a ship and the big villains in their version of the setting.
The playbooks offer some interesting characters aboard the ship. Each one has a vice that they must wrestle with that can cause the whole crew trouble. The Captain, for example, has an ambition that they must sometimes sacrifice a member of the crew to achieve.
Players spend time during the first session drawing a great map of the see and filling it with locations and characters that interest them the most. Building a setting can sometimes be a challenge with this style of game but I found all of the evil powers to be very compelling. It offers a great skeleton to build a campaign full of weird adventures upon.
7th Sea: The Price of Arrogance
I hold a special place for the game 7th Sea in my heart. It featured my first published work as a designer and is one of my favorite games to have run for my friends. It’s set in a world much like our own during an age of sail with sorcerous powers flowing through the bloodlines of nobility.
7th Sea: The Price of Arrogance is a campaign for the second edition of the game. It’s a globetrotting adventure featuring cursed artifacts, sailing to the New World and factions vying for control of the world. In addition, there’s an expansion book that adds more to the campaign to extend it for long term storytelling.
Game masters can even choose distinct paths through the adventure that play up different elements of the setting. One path offers more supernatural elements, another plays up strange artifacts and clockpunk science while a third brings in more factional intrigue. Each path changes villains and encounters to make each playthrough unique.
Ahoy
Leder Games are known for asymmetrical designs. That means that, depending on which faction a player chooses, the goals of the game might be different. They are most famous for games like Root and Arcs, but they’ve also got a seafaring game called Ahoy that’s a great entry level exhibition of their design philosophies.
Players can choose to either be a shark armada, a mollusk revolution or mercenary smugglers in the base game. The sharks and mollusks offer an area control game to win, while the smugglers are there to make money and give value to each region. All of it is brought to life with Kyle Ferrin’s adorable artwork.
At Gen Con this year, the company released a pair of expansions to change up the game play further. Ahoy Rivals and Renegades expand the war at sea with orca and turtle factions. Ahoy Fang and Fortune brings brand new factions like a leviathan or coral capped pirates who just want to party.
Merchants and Marauders
My favorite pirate game of all time is Sid Meier’s Pirates. Merchants and Marauders provides a nearly perfect board game translation of the experience that can be played with friends. In case it wasn’t clear from the title, players can try their hand at being legitimate cargo haulers, go on the account and plunder their opponents or, most likely, a bit of both.
The Seas of Glory expansion adds several concepts and rules to make gameplay more detailed. Things like wind management, smuggling rules and even making sure there’s not a mutiny brewing. The only thing I don’t like about this game is that it dips in and out of print which can make finding it a treasure hunt of its own.
Blood & Plunder
Firelock Games has several great historical wargames on offer. For the purposes of this list, Blood & Plunder offers players a chance to battle ship to ship combat or taking ports for plunder. The starter box offers a handful of minis plus two small sloops to use as terrain for pitched sea boardings.
The company has two additional games that complement Blood & Plunder. Port Royal offers a campaign based skirmish game with additional miniatures and a storyline. Oak & Iron offers fleet combat.
These pirate games can be purchased from their makers directly, through online vendors and Friendly Local Game Stores. Leave your favorite pirate tabletop game in the comments.