Pirate Ship

Pirate Ship
Info
Cost
Type(s)	Action - Attack
Kingdom card?	Yes
Set	Seaside
Illustrator(s)	Franz Vohwinkel
Card text
Choose one: + per Coin token on your Pirate Ship mat; or each other player reveals the top 2 cards of their deck, trashes one of those Treasures that you choose, and discards the rest, and then if anyone trashed a Treasure, you add a Coin token to your Pirate Ship mat.

Pirate Ship is an Action-Attack card from Seaside. When you play Pirate Ship, you have two choices. You can "attack" other players by making them trash Treasure cards from the top two cards of their deck; if you're successful, your Pirates get a Coin token on your Pirate Ship mat. Alternatively, when you play Pirate Ship, you can choose to get + per Coin token your pirates have plundered. (This does not use them up.)

Although Pirate Ship often gets a reputation among inexperienced players as a powerful card, it is actually very rarely effective, and using it often benefits your opponents more than you.

It was removed from the second edition of Seaside and replaced with Corsair which has a similar attack but is a stronger card, most notably because it cannot relieve the attacked player of unwanted Coppers.

FAQ

Official FAQ

• Players revealing a card like Moat do so before you choose your option.
• If you choose the first option, you get + per Coin token on your Pirate Ship mat; the Coin tokens stay there.
• If you choose the second option, each other player reveals the top 2 cards of their deck, trashes a revealed Treasure of your choice, if possible, and discards the rest of their revealed cards.
• Then, if any players did trash a Treasure, you add a Coin token to your Pirate Ship mat (from the supply of tokens).
• You get at most one Coin token per play of Pirate Ship.
• Take a Pirate Ship mat when you first need one.

Other Rules clarifications

• Coin tokens on your Pirate Ship mat cannot be spent (as the Coin tokens from Dominion: Guilds can be).

Strategy

Before it was removed, Pirate Ship was an exceedingly weak card, whose Attack was often beneficial to your opponents and whose payload increased in strength far too slowly for most Kingdoms.

The fundamental paradox of Pirate Ship is that in order for its payload to reach a useful amount, you need to play it multiple times, which usually entails playing it early in the game; but if you play it early in the game, you’re very likely to cycle through your opponents’ bad starting cards and trash their Coppers for them, speeding up their progress and removing junk from their decks. Because of how much it helps your opponents, Pirate Ship is very weak in the early game, and it usually takes too long to generate significant if you don't start playing it until the late game. Even disregarding the help it gives your opponents, having a terminal card give you no benefit this turn for on every subsequent play (assuming it hits an opponent’s Treasure) is not a strong effect in the early game, when you typically want to establish deck control rather than begin accumulating payload. Additionally, Pirate Ship’s eventual payoff to opportunity cost ratio is low, as even after two plays it’s at best a terminal silver, or after three plays a terminal Gold, which compares unfavorably to just buying those Treasures instead of Pirate Ship.

The other main weakness of Pirate Ship is that Treasures are very often not the best payload cards on the board, and so a strong deck can often be built of mostly Action cards. This means that Pirate Ship is unlikely either to find a Treasure to trash in the later stages of the game (thus failing to increase its generation) or to be of any threat to your opponents’ payload.

Pirate Ship can be usable in fairly rare scenarios in which multiple of the above generalizations are not true. When Treasures are the only payload, Pirate Ship may actually have a chance to harm your opponents’ economy. Additionally, with a Throne Room variant such as King's Court, it may be possible to play Pirate Ship enough times in the late game for it to generate significant . Similarly, Captain makes it easier to consistently play Pirate Ship many times, while also reducing the amount of terminal space normally needed to do so and providing the flexibility to be played as something other than a terminal stop card, Kingdom permitting. Pirate Ship’s strongest synergy is with Capitalism, which changes almost all payload cards into Treasures. As such, it greatly increases Pirate Ship’s effectiveness as an Attack while also allowing you to play it in the Buy phase, which removes the need for village support.

Versions

English versions

Print	Digital	Text	Release	Date
		Choose one: Each other player reveals the top 2 cards of his deck, trashes a revealed Treasure that you choose, discards the rest, and if anyone trashed a Treasure you take a Coin token; or, + per Coin token you’ve taken with Pirate Ships this game.	Seaside	October 2009
		Choose one: + per Coin token on your Pirate Ship mat; or each other player reveals the top 2 cards of their deck, trashes one of those Treasures that you choose, and discards the rest, and then if anyone trashed a Treasure you add a Coin token to your Pirate Ship mat.	Seaside (2017 printing)	July 2017
		Choose one: + per Coin token on your Pirate Ship mat; or each other player reveals the top 2 cards of their deck, trashes one of those Treasures that you choose, and discards the rest, and then if anyone trashed a Treasure, you add a Coin token to your Pirate Ship mat.	Seaside (2020 printing)	October 2020

Other language versions

Language	Name	Print	Digital	Text	Notes
Chinese	海盜船 (pron. hǎidàochuán)
Czech	Pirátská loď
Dutch	Piratenschip
Finnish	Merirosvolaiva				Misprint: the attack part of the card says you gain a coin token for each Treasure destroyed this way.
French	Bateau pirate
German	Piratenschiff			Wähle eins: Jeder Mitspieler deckt die obersten 2 Karten seines Nachziehstapels auf und entsorgt eine Geldkarte (wenn vorhanden) nach deiner Wahl. Die restlichen Karten legen die Mitspieler ab. Wird insgesamt mindestens eine Karte entsorgt, erhältst du eine Münze auf dein Piratenschiff-Tableau. Oder: + für jede Münze auf deinem Piratenschiff-Tableau.	(2014)
German	Piratenschiff			Wähle eins: + für jede Münze auf deinem Piratenschiff-Tableau oder Jeder Mitspieler deckt die obersten 2 Karten seines Nachziehstapels auf, entsorgt davon eine Geldkarte nach deiner Wahl und legt den Rest ab. Lege eine Münze auf dein Piratenschiff-Tableau, wenn mindestens 1 Karte entsorgt wurde.	(Nachdruck 2018)
German	Piratenschiff			Wähle eins: + pro Geldmarker auf deinem Piratenschiff-Tableau, oder jeder Mitspieler deckt die obersten 2 Karten seines Nachziehstapels auf, entsorgt davon eine Geldkarte, die du wählst, und legt den Rest ab, und wenn dann mindestens ein Spieler eine Geldkarte entsorgt hat, lege einen Geldmarker auf dein Piratenschiff-Tableau.	(Nachdruck 2021)
Italian	Nave Pirata
Japanese	海賊船 (pron. kaizoku-sen)			次のうち1つを選ぶ:「あなたの海賊船マットの上の海賊船トークン1枚につき+」:「他のプレイヤーは全員、 山札の上から2枚を公開し、その中のあなたが選択する財宝カード1枚を廃棄し、残りを捨て札にする。誰かが財宝カードを廃棄した場合、あなたは目分の海賊船マットの上に海賊船トークン1枚を追加する」
Korean	해적선 (pron. haejeogseon)
Polish	Okręt piracki			Wybierz: każdy z pozostałych graczy odkrywa 2 wierzchnie karty ze swojej talii, wyrzuca na śmietnisko wybraną przez ciebie odkrytą kartę Skarbu i odrzuca resztę (jeżeli ktokolwiek wyrzucił kartę Skarbu, weź żeton monety); albo + za każdy żeton monety, jaki zdobyłeś w powyższy sposób w tej rozgrywce.	(2016)
Russian	Пиратский Корабль (pron. piratskiy korabl')			Выберите одно: + за каждый Жетон на вашем Пиратском мате; либо каждый другой игрок раскрывает 2 верхние карты своей колоды, выкидывает раскрытое Сокровище по вашему выбору, сбрасывает остальные карты и если кто-то выкинул Сокровище, то вы добавляете Золотой Жетон на ваш Пиратский мат.
Spanish	Barco Pirata

Trivia

Official card art.

Card Art

The art connects with Island to the left and Native Village to the right.

—Donald X. Vaccarino, 'Art Trivia'

Secret History

This started out as a victory card that was worth more points based on how much treasure you stole with it. It was an actual flavor-based design - what would pirates do? That version seemed cool but just wasn't played often enough. At the same time I was replacing Treasury, and one of the possibilities I was considering was "choose one - gain a counter, or + per counter." I realized I could graft that onto the Thieving of Pirate Ship and that's what happened. Originally you used trashed treasures to track the value of the Pirate Ships, but near the end it switched to counters, which is slightly simpler, as you might have trashed some 's and 's, but they still just count as here.

—Donald X. Vaccarino, The Secret History of the Seaside Cards

Retrospective

The story I always tell. It's the first game ever with Pirate Ship. Three players. We all buy Pirate Ship. Someone who bought Pirate Ship wins. And Bill says, "well that was obviously broken." We talk about it for a while, then play the same board again, no changes. This time I don't buy Pirate Ship and I win.

This then was the story of the card, over and over. People saying, how can you be serious about this crazy powerful card, and me beating them by not buying it. Those games sucked; if I lost they would say, "aha see, we were right the whole time, this card is broken." But the card is so bad that I never lost.

This is no happy ending. What I actually had to do was make the card more powerful, despite people thinking it was broken already. Or, replace it, even though people would annoy me by saying, "hooray you got rid of the broken card." But there it is in the set, and it's absolutely one of the weakest cards in the game, even with 4 players. It trashes your opponents' Coppers! They normally have to work at that themselves, but you do it for them. Miser is the fixed version, trashing your own Coppers instead, and it's still weak.

—Donald X. Vaccarino, If you were to rank the expansions from best to worst, what would the bottom 3 be?