Pirates Outlaws

Pirates Outlaws

Pirates Outlaws is a roguelite deckbuilder where the player is the captain of a pirate ship in search of fame and fortune, and must fight against Human pirates, skeletons, ghosts and monsters. The game mechanics will be very familiar to anyone who played other games in the genre such as Slay The Spire or Neoverse, although of course Pirates Outlaws has its own unique twists.

Combat Mechanics

Combat is turn based, with the player’s actions being represented by the cards drawn into their hand, and you’ll see what action each enemy intends to take on their turn. Melee attacks can only target the enemy closest to the player (unless the card says it damages all enemies) but are usually free to play. Ranged attacks can target any enemy but they cost ammo to play. Other cards can give the player armour (which can be carried forward to the next turn), restore health, apply status effects to the player or enemies, change the position of an enemy, or have other special effects.

Real player with 78.6 hrs in game


Read More: Best Roguelike Deckbuilder Turn-Based Strategy Games.


This game looks and plays like a pirate skinned Slay the Spire, and well, that is pretty accurate and not a bad thing either. It does mold and craft its own unique image in both the style and gameplay. Some of the game design choices would actually make me think it is more of an Anti-Slay-the-Spire at times as it makes deliberate design decisions to stray from the path of its inspiration.

While you can craft some pretty OP builds still, it can be a lot harder to achieve some of the broken builds of stacking poison to 999 or such - largely because the status system in this pirate game is quite different. Only one status is allowed to be active at a time. So if your enemy is poisoned, they can wipe their poison stacks clean by buffing their self with an attack increase. Because buffs can erase debuffs and vice versa. However, this goes for the player too. There is even a boss battle that will absolutely wipe the floor with you if you don’t have some kind of way to buff yourself. He will keep raising your injury (this game’s version of poison) stacks on you and they will just get higher and higher unless you wipe it with a buff. Not much different than how Slay the Spire bosses can hard counter some of your decks. But at the same time it is just different and feels unique. I wasn’t so sure about the status system at first but it grown on me quite a bit. Which I think brings me to the next major difference.

Real player with 69.4 hrs in game

Pirates Outlaws on Steam