Micro Pirates

Jun 6, 2026

Publisher: Thistroy Games
Designers: Michał Jagodziński, Kamil Langie
Links: BGG

Micro Pirates is a small game about… well, pirates. You are a captain of a ship and your aim is to gain fame through completing heroic or unscrupulous deeds, either by completing quests and trades, or just blowing up some merchant ships and stealing the cargo for your own gains.

Gameplay

The game is played on a 3x3 tile board, each tile has resources to acquire, merchants to attack, and the corners have ports that you can dock at and trade. The main loop of the game is two actions per player until someone hits the win conditions that apply to their character, but generally when you hit 10 reputation.

At the beginning of the game you select a combination of a ship and a captain, and this combination will give you a few bonuses for actions you take during your turn. For example, one particular captain has a bonus for fighting while another will have a bonus for fishing. The key to the game is working with your chosen combination and taking advantage of the abilities to gain your reputation. As you may be gathering at this point you have multiple ways to gain reputation and most of them don’t include blowing up any unsuspecting merchant ships or other players.

Rules

Micro Pirates suffers from what many games do, the rule book reads more complicated than the game actually is. Trudging through the rules the first time felt like a lot to digest, and the rule book includes a lot of examples to explain the rules, which is excellent when you’re trying to decide if you’ve done something right, not great for learning the rules initially. Also, the rule book either omits items completely or just doesn’t explain them correctly. The rules forum has been quite busy with people trying to find clarification on what various icons in the game mean, you sometimes find cards whose individual icons are explained, but the combination doesn’t clarify what needs to be done. I understand why they went heavy with the iconography, it’s a common technique to reduce the language dependency of the game, but I hope an updated rule book or errata is published to help out players in the future without digging through the forums.

Verdict

I enjoy the game, even with the rules issues, and I see us playing again possibly with more players rather than just me and Jo. The only issue I find with the idea of more players is the amount of time it’ll require to run through, our first play-through as a duo was at 90 minutes, and the second wasn’t much better. While the name ‘Micro’ makes you think of a small, quick game, this is anything but. If you’re into games with lots of bits and simple gameplay cycle, then this could be a game for you.