Pirates are fun! At least, the romanticized version of pirates that has become a staple of modern popular culture is fun. These free-roaming scallywags are handmade to stand up to the system, display roguish charm, and go on all kinds of adventures. The high seas provide access to the whole world, so there’s practically no limit to the adventures you’re able to go on in a pirate-themed tabletop game.
So, fly your jolly rogers, me hearties, and get set to pillage and plunder your treasure after we showcase some of the best games you may use to role-play as pirates!
Updated July 16, 2025 by Davis Collins:As our world becomes more observed and more controlled by the day, the fantasy of being a pirate, of escaping social, physical, and geographic chains, becomes more and more appealing. We’ve come back to this list to add some additional items that facilitate that experience.
7th Sea Core Rulebook
It’s the biggest name in the niche
From the makers of the Call of Cthulhu TTRPG, 7th Sea is a pirate-themed fantasy game full of swashbuckling adventure and daring-do in a world designed to bring our most romantic and action-packed pirate fantasies to life.
7th Sea is a game of high-seas adventure that casts the players as a group of sailing heroes who, though they may sometimes be too benevolent to technically be pirates, nevertheless embody everything grand and epic about the pirates of popular culture. 7th Sea is likely the most recognizable name in the admittedly niche area of pirate-themed tabletop role-playing.
It is definitivelya fantasy adventure game, with plenty of magic and monsters, so it’ll be familiar enough to experienced tabletop role-players, while still being optimized for the specific kind of campaign it’s geared toward. If you’re looking for classic, romanticized swashbuckling adventures, this is probably the game for you!
Plunder: A Pirate’s Life
Loads of elements capturing every aspect of a pirate’s life
This pirate simulation game puts each player in charge of a small fleet of pirate ships and tasks them with conquering islands and battling each other as they reace to get the resources they need to win.
If you’re looking for something that will give you the feel of being not just a single pirate, but the manager of a small fleet, this is the game for you. Plunder: A Pirate’s Life is a simulation that captures tons of aspects of, well, a pirate’s life, including searching for treasure, battling and extorting other pirates, dealing with storms, and conquering islands.
It’s a game that’ssometimes compared to Settlers of Catan, because of the way the islands you capture spawn useful resources. However, you have a much larger variety of options for what to do with those resources. Instead of just using them to build things, you use them to steal, extort, repair your ships, conquer more islands, and battle your enemies.
Skybound: Pirate Tails
Turns out some pirates can be fluffy
This cute, endearing game takes the concept of buried pirate treasure to an interesting, kid-friendly place, while still having interesting strategic decisions.
The burying of treasure is one of the most iconic elements of pirates in modern pop culture. Like many aspects of the modern image of pirates, this idea is completely ahistorical, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s a major element of the pirate theme, creating an interesting connection between them and a common woodland animal.
In this game, every player is a squirrel, working to hide their treasure, consisting of nuts, in ways that will hopefully protect it from being raided. There are only so many hiding places, and they’re all going to be raided eventually, so the real game is in deciding when to go after a specific hiding place, balancing the desire to maximize your reward with the need to get a stash while it’s still there.
Pirates Of The Spanish Main RPG
Be a pirate in the real world!
Founded on the Savage Worlds system, pirates of the Spanish main is a historical pirate RPG where the players adventure around the waters of the Caribbean during the golden age of piracy.
Maybe you don’t want a fantasy world. Maybe you want to be a pirate in the real world, in real history. If that’s the case, this is probably the game for you. Based on the card game by Wizkids and built using the Savage Worlds system that powers several other TTRPGs,including Deadlands, Pirates of the Spanish Main is a historical, non-fantasy take on the Pirate Genre.
This game gives you the option of playing one of many historical types of pirate, from a traditional high-seas robber to a privateer robbing one nation to enrich another. Though this game is set in the real world, it’s not especially gritty from a mechanical standpoint. The point isn’t to excise romanticism, just put one, and only one, of its feet in reality. Just because you’re in the real world doesn’t mean you need to worry about historical realities mucking up your swashbuckling action.
Pathfinder 2e Core Rulebook
Unparalleled ability to build anything you want
Second in popularity only to Dungeons and Dragons itself, the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game by Paizo presents a fantasy adventure experience that rivals that of its prestigious competitor, and has several elements specifically intended to accommodate a pirate-themed campaign.
To some extent, mostfantasy adventure gamescould be used to run a pirate campaign. However, though it isn’t designedjustto be a pirate game,Pathfinderstill bears special mention for the fact that a significant amount of the material in it is designed with such games in mind. The Swashbuckler class is specifically modeled after popular depictions of pirates, and characters of that class or another can take the pirate archetype to gain access to several pirate-themed features.
On top of that, there’s an entire nation, The Shackles, in the game’s official setting dedicated to piracy, and there is a goddess of piracy for such characters to worship. If you’re looking to run a pirate campaign in a universe with fantasy elements, and like the idea of being able to build absolutely any character you’re able to imagine, this is the game for you.
Starfinder Core Rulebook
There are plenty of pirates in space!
The sci-fi spin-off of the Pathfinder RPG, Starfinder inherits many of the features that make Pathfinder suitable for a pirate-themed campaign.
Hey, we never said sea pirates were the only ones allowed.Starfinderis thefar-future, space operaspin-off of the Pathfinder roleplaying game. Though its far-future setting means that campaigns run in it will lack many core elements of the pirate aesthetic, the game inherits many of the features which make Pathfinder such a good pick for this kind of campaign. Besmara, the pirate goddess, is more prominent than ever in this iteration of the setting, and this game also has character options specifically geared towards being a space pirate.
Most importantly, this game has extremely well-crafted and detailed rules for spaceship combat. Ship-to-ship battles are an important part of any pirate campaign, and there is probably no other game in the world that will do a better job bringing starship combat to life than Starfinder does.
Rogue Stars: Skirmish Wargaming in a Science Fiction Underworld
Fast and simple roleplay wargaming
Another sci-fi game, one that lies on the fine line between a wargame and a TTRPG, Rogue Stars lets you play as a group of starfaring rogues setting out on a wide variety of adventures.
Another game that allows you to be a space pirate, Rogue Stars: Skirmish Wargaming in a science-fiction underworld is a skirmish wargame (the same subgenre as many popular miniatures wargames, includingthe Warhammer games) that casts the players as a team of space outlaws made with some relatively deep character creation rules. It’s a cooperative game, allowing the players to go on a ton of adventures in an interesting sci-fi setting.
It has many of the same things going for it as Starfinder, but its lack of fantasy elements, skirmish movement, and narrower focus can make it more ideal for some groups looking to play as space pirates in a less magical sci-fi world.
Forgotten Waters
A wonderful cooperative experience
From the makers of Dead of Winter, this cooperative board game recreates much of what makes that game great, but brings a lighter tone and a pirate aesthetic with a focus on exploration and adventure.
From Plaid Hat Games, the company behind the excellentpost-apocalyptic zombie survival game Dead of Winter, Forgotten Waters is a cooperative tabletop pirate game that casts the players as the crew of a pirate ship and tasks them with accomplishing a variety of goals. There are numerous playable scenarios to choose from, and an entire book of locations with their own mechanical properties, which help sell the sense that you’re exploring as you play this game.
The most impressive thing about this game is how it manages to make its complexity smooth and seamless. There is a ton going on here, but this game’s brilliant design makes something that is, in many ways, as complex as a full-on tabletop RPG, work as a one-session board game.
50 Fathoms Explorer’s Edition
There was a pirate-themed apocalypse
In a world ruined by a catastrophic flood and menaced by magical monstrosities, your characters, who are at once apocalypse survivors and high-seas adventurers, must navigate the strange and magical world in which they’ve found themselves.
Sometimes, RPGs are great because of their finely crafted mechanics, meticulous power-balancing, and lovingly world-built setting. Other times, a game’s premise is just so gloriously batcrap that it could be attached to any old set of mechanics, and you’d still want to play it.
This particular game is attached to the Savage Worlds system, so its mechanics are quite good, but what really makes this game special is thebizarre post-apocalyptic pirate setting in which it takes place. This game takes place in a world which was cursed with an apocalyptic flood, which left most of it submerged, and placed the survivors in a world where the ocean is never far away. In this backdrop, the protagonists engage in all manner of adventures, doing what they must to survive in the higher-than-ever seas!
Pirate Borg Core Rulebook (2nd Printing)
Act like a real pirate
Derived from the grimdark fantasy RPGMörk Borg, Pirate Borg is a brutal game about being a heinous scoundrel who loots, pillages, murders, and terrorizes as they quest for gain and adventure until it’s the death of them.
Most of these games romanticize pirates, making them out to be either outright heroic, or, failing that, downplaying the ghastly and criminal elements of what they do. This is unsurprising. Most pirate media romanticizes its subjects, so it’s only fitting that games meant to imitate it would do the same.
However, if you’re looking for something thatdoesn’tdo that, Pirate Borg is the game for you. Based on the award-winning Mörk Borg dark fantasy RPG, Pirate Borg brings the darkness and amorality of pirates into focus while still providing the rough-and-tumble adventure that brings one to this genre.
FAQ
What games did pirates play?
Believe it or not, they did a lot of tabletop gaming! They played a wide variety of board and card games, such as poker, liar’s dice. Conveniently, it’s possible to reproduce many of these games at your table, allowing your group to do some in-character gaming during downtime.
How realistic are these games?
Only one of the games on this list (Pirates of the Spanish Main) takes place in real history, and even it isn’t especially gritty and grounded. All of the other games here, including Pirate Borg, the one with the darkest and grittiest tone, feature magic, space travel, or, in Starfinder’s case, both. Realism isn’t what any game here is going for.
