Pirates and Traders

Fifteen men on the dead man’s chest — Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!
– R. L. Stevenson, Treasure Island

The year is 1650. You and your crew have just arrived in the Carribean sea. It is time to set sail for glory or a watery grave. Pirates and Traders is a single-player strategy/role-playing game for Android. Sail around the Carribean sea to buy and sell goods or plunder and pillage. Will you be a peaceful trader or a dreadful pirate? It is up to you.

Download the game from Google Play (Gold! version) or the Amazon Appstore (Gold! version).

Designer’s Notes

As should be obvious, Pirates and Traders is a homage to Sid Meier’s classic PC game, Pirates! It would be remiss, however, not to mention other influences on the game – most notably Pieter Spronck’s “Space Trader” (for PalmOS), David Braben and Ian Bell’s “Elite”, and the Richard Berg boardgame “Blackbeard”.

Like most of my projects, this one got started because I missed having a game of this kind to play (on my phone, which was my primary gaming platform for a couple of months while enjoying maternity duty). After the experience of doing “A Brief History of Rome” for Android, I thought this would be possible to do fairly quickly, and it was. Of course, I then spent another 4 years refining and further developing the game to its current state.

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