Pirates – Digital Strategy Game

Remember the Pirates Constructible Strategy Game? That hood-certified game where you collect and build little polystyrene pirate ships, then duke it out on the high seas to find treasure on wild islands and sink enemy ships? And later expansions got progressively more and more complex and somewhat stupid?
This is that game, taken back to the basics of Pirates of the Spanish Main. Just the English, Spanish, and Pirates battling for treasure and dominance over the seas. No forts, no terrain, no schooners, no galleys, no junks, no sea monsters, no Nautilus-inspired submarines, no Vikings, no gratuitous Disney tie-ins, just pure Pirates of the Spanish Main.
Do I recommend this? ABSOLUTELY. I loved this game as a kid, and I had a good number of pieces from one of those secondhand boxes of packs sold at Target in 2014, but they were presumably thrown away in a move in 2019. With the CSG long out-of-print (and replaced by a generic card game), secondhand packs hard for me personally to obtain, and development of an adaptation for Tabletop Simulator progressing at a snail's pace, this game will allow me to relive precious childhood memories, while making new ones.
The one criticism I have is the small payout at game's end. I want to stress that this is NOT a gacha game. It does NOT have any microtransactions. Everything can be acquired using in-game currency, which is...wood (shouldn't it be gold?). You use this wood to buy chests with a random item inside, either a ship or a crew. Common chests cost 50 wood, and rare chests cost 150. That's fine, but the problem is that you only get 10 wood at the end of each game, regardless of if you win or lose.
Other than that, this is a fantastic game. I was in the first public game played shortly after release with some other users from the games' Discord, and found myself engaged in an intense game of cat-and-mouse with three other players, one of whom I destroyed myself, and the other two I let tear each other apart before moving in on the bloodied victor. Of course, I lost because the survivor got more treasure, but I didn't care. What matters is that I got to play this game after learning about it back in September. I am forever grateful to Twin Dimensions Productions for allowing me to relive childhood memories, and making new ones.
My big hope is that if this game gets popular enough, it'll convince WizKids to resurrect the Pirates CSG.

This game is way more strategical than I thought! Which is cool. Yes, there is dice rolling (in shooting and some abilities) but first you have to manoeuvre and position your fleet so that your ships get a chance to shoot. And because of the nifty 1 action per turn mechanic -which means either shoot or move- outmanoeuvering your enemies is important. However, this changes as soon as you get a captain (you can load crew members on your ships, granting new abilities) because a captain lets his or her ship move and shoot on the same turn.
But it's not all about shooting cannons and sinking ships. If you're rubbish at shooting (like I am), it may be better to go for the 'economic' victory condition, that is you have to bring back a certain amount of treasure to your home island. By default you win the game when you either sink all enemy ships or gather enough treasure, but the host can change that in the game settings, as well as the amount of treasure and the sice of player fleets. By the way, Treasure on your home island is safe but if another player sinks one of your ships with treasure on board, they get half of it!
As of this writing, the game is very early access so the number of different ships, crew, nationalities and abilities is still somewhat limited (but the UI hints on more sets of ships/crew to come). Some further tweaking of the UI and tooltips would also be nice. So I'm hoping for more content in the future and will update this review when this happens.
For now it's a good looking (ship models look cool) multiplayer pirate game with a board game feel and lots of strategy and some dice rolling that also scales well with different player counts.

I really liked the concept of PCSG, and this game is a close recreation of that. Sure, it has kinks to work out and a lot of QoL improvements needed, but considering it's being made by a single dev in their spare time (as far as I can tell) as a tribute to the original, it is an amazing piece of work.

This game is perfect for those who are fans of the Pirates CSG that was released in the early 2000s. Bear in mind it still has some kinks to work out, but this is a labor of love. The only way it could be just like the original game that was released by Sony (Soney online; SOE) is if someone managed to use that source code to make it.
You want to see this game get polished and better? Buy it

A good recreation of the original tabletop version. Even still in development, its quite fun

This game is an amazing time with friends and against the new bots that were added recently. Would Highly recommend to anyone who grew up playing the old table top game this is inspired by!

ARRRRGH!! Very nostalgic! I've been collecting the game for ages so when I saw this announced on the Pirates of the Spanish Main reddit, I was excited! With the recent sale and update, I decided to pull the trigger and try this game out with a friend. With the recent addition of bots, games were quite tense and competitive! We spent a lot of time positioning our ships in an outright duel to the death.

On the other hand, this game is Early Access, so there were a couple of bugs we were encountering. Roughly 1 in 5 games weren't dropping rewards, or we would purchase a chest but the transaction wouldn't go through and we would need to reboot and try again. Definitely rough around the edges, but still a gem nonetheless.

I can't wait to see future updates and additional sets added. Very curious to see how that would affect chests. Would we be able to buy chests for specific sets? Or would chests pull from the entire pool of available pieces? The latter would make collecting all the game pieces much more difficult.

I do have a couple suggestions, but I will be posting those in the Discord channel. Overall, I very much recommend this game, especially when it is on sale! Development is a team of one and he/she deserves a reward for their efforts!