Pirate Games: The Best Picks on PC and Console

Summary: Pirate games split into two traditions that barely overlap. One is about the ship, where the vessel is the character and the pleasure is sailing it. The other is about the crew, where the ship is a shared room and the pleasure is the people in it. Sea of Thieves owns the second, Assassin's Creed IV owns the first, and most disappointments come from buying one while wanting the other.

• Sea of Thieves is the genre's centre of gravity and has been on PS5 since 2024, so it is no longer an Xbox question.
• Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag is thirteen years old and still the best single-player pirate game anyone has made.
• Skull and Bones had the biggest budget in the genre and the weakest reception, for reasons worth understanding before you buy it discounted.
• Almost nothing in the genre resembles actual piracy, which was shorter, poorer and much less galleon-shaped than any of this.

For a fantasy this popular, the genre is surprisingly thin. There are perhaps six pirate games worth recommending without qualification, and two of them are over a decade old. The reason is that ships are expensive to simulate and pirates are cheap to theme, so a lot of what carries the label is a generic game wearing a tricorn hat.

What Makes a Good Pirate Game

The test is whether the ship is a vehicle or a place. A vehicle you steer from a menu-like cockpit, and combat is a matter of angles and reload timers. A place has a deck you walk around, sails somebody has to adjust, a hold that floods, and jobs that need more hands than you have.

The second is far more expensive to build, which is why so few games do it. It is also the entire reason the good ones feel different from a naval strategy game with skulls on the loading screen. If crews rather than ships are what you are after, the multiplayer roundup covers the same question without the nautical theme.

The Best Pirate Games Right Now

Five that hold up, covering both traditions and the comedy branch nobody expects.

• Sea of Thieves. Rare's shared-world game is the only one where the ship is genuinely a place. Four people, one vessel, jobs that cannot all be done at once, and other real crews on the horizon who may or may not be friendly. Thin when played alone and unmatched with three friends.
• Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag. From 2013 and still the best solo pirate game. Naval combat that nothing has bettered, a Caribbean worth exploring, and shanties the crew sings while you sail. The Assassin's Creed parts are the weakest thing in it.
• Sid Meier's Pirates! The 2004 remake of a 1987 game, and the systems still work. Trade, raid, court governors' daughters, retire with a rank. It costs almost nothing and is the closest thing to a complete pirate career simulator.
• Return to Monkey Island. The other tradition entirely: a comedy adventure where you barely sail anything. Ron Gilbert returned to finish a story he started in 1990, and the insult swordfighting is intact.
• Blazing Sails. Cheap, chaotic, and honest about being a pirate battle royale rather than a world. Crews fight, ships sink, rounds end. Good for an evening rather than a hobby.

Pirate Games on PC

PC has everything above plus the indie sailing tier, which is where the genre is actually healthy. Sailwind is a slow, unforgiving sailing simulator with no combat and a devoted following. King of Seas and Sail Forth are lighter arcade options. Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire is a proper role-playing game that happens to give you a ship and an archipelago.

These are all small releases that discount heavily and often, so there is rarely a reason to buy one at full price. Watching the seasonal sale calendar will get you three of them for the price of one new release, and none of them get worse for waiting.

Pirate Games on Console

The console picture changed in 2024, when Sea of Thieves left Xbox exclusivity and arrived on PS5 as part of Microsoft's multiplatform shift. It remains on Game Pass, which is still the cheapest route in if you subscribe, but it is no longer a reason to own one console over the other.

Black Flag, Skull and Bones and the Monkey Island games are all on both. What consoles lack is the indie sailing tier, most of which never leaves PC. If you only own a console, the genre is roughly four games deep rather than a dozen.

Free Pirate Games

This is the weakest part of the genre and it is worth being blunt about it. There is no free equivalent of Sea of Thieves. What exists is mobile strategy games with pirate art, browser sailing games of the sort that have been around since Flash, and the occasional free weekend on the paid titles.

The mobile ones follow the usual pattern: free to install, built around a currency, and paced so that the currency becomes tempting somewhere around the second week. If you decide to spend on one, a prepaid wallet like Razer Gold is usually better value per unit than the in-app purchase, since the app store's cut is baked into the latter.

What Skull and Bones Got Wrong

Ubisoft spent roughly a decade on Skull and Bones before releasing it in February 2024 to mixed reviews, and the failure is instructive rather than just embarrassing. It began life as a Black Flag spin-off, which meant it inherited that game's ship combat without inheriting the reason anyone cared about it.

You are the ship. There is no boarding, no crew to command on deck, no swordfight. The vessel is a vehicle with upgrade slots, and every encounter resolves as a health bar. That is the exact distinction from the top of this article, and it is why a large budget produced a smaller game than a thirteen-year-old one. It is worth playing at a deep discount if naval combat alone is enough for you, and worth skipping if it is not. Ubisoft's other open-world work, including Assassin's Creed Shadows, suggests the studio knows how to build the missing half.

What These Games Get Wrong About Real Pirates

Nearly every convention in the genre comes from fiction rather than history. According to Royal Museums Greenwich, the so-called golden age of piracy ran from roughly the 1680s to the 1720s, which is about forty years rather than the timeless era games imply.

The other departures are larger. Most pirates sailed small, fast sloops rather than the towering galleons games favour, because the point was to outrun warships and catch merchants, not to win set-piece broadsides. Careers were short and usually ended badly. Buried treasure is almost entirely a literary invention, popularised by Treasure Island rather than recorded in trial documents. And plunder was mostly cargo, food, rope and medicine, which is considerably less fun to put in a chest.

None of this is a criticism of the games. It is context for why they all feel similar: they are adapting the same nineteenth-century fiction rather than the same history, which is also why the most accurate thing most of them get right is the singing.

Decide Whether You Want a Ship or a Crew

That one question sorts the whole genre. If you want to command a vessel alone, own the sea and progress a career, Black Flag first and Sid Meier's Pirates! after it. If you want three friends shouting about who left the anchor down, Sea of Thieves and nothing else comes close. If you want neither and are really here for the setting, Return to Monkey Island is the one people forget to recommend.

The mistake is buying a ship game while wanting a crew game, which is what happened to a lot of people in 2024. Work out which one you are, then browse gaming gift cards for whichever platform your crew is already on.