The Pirate Code

Welcome the Sparkling Seas in the golden age of piracy!

The Pirate Code is a deck-building sandbox game where you are left to chart your own storied legacy. Each card in your hand presents you with a compelling choice - do you leverage their resource icons, allowing you to complete contracts, attack others, bury treasure, resupply, and more? Or do you discard them to move, potentially activating their powerful and unique ability as well? This choice underpins each turn as you wrestle with how best to utilize your crew.

No two victories in The Pirate Code look exactly alike. There are many avenues to make a name for yourself, and as Captain, you’ll need to decide which are worth your time.

There are a variety of contracts, which offer you a mixture of Victory Points, Coins, and Reputation for completing them. Coins can be buried for victory points, and other players can attempt to dig them up. Reputation is checked several times during the game, awarding points to the most Infamous players.

When the time is right, you may even be willing to turn your cannons onto another player and attempt to procure their cargo in a way that befits a real pirate. If they’ve got nothing worth stealing, you can always blow a few holes in their hull and sail away to safety.

Improve the efficiency of the crew through leadership and sometimes, tough love. Spend Hearts to mitigate randomness. Red hearts allow you to draw new crew, letting you cultivate the perfect crew for the job. Black hearts allow you to reroll dice, turning a missed shot or failed gamble into a winning one. Leveraging these hearts will cause your Captains Log to advance, awarding new abilities to your crew based on your style of leadership.

—description from the publisher