But what discouraged me most about Pirates! is how little Firaxis tried to improve on the original game. They added some new things, like the ballroom dancing I mentioned before, but basically this new Pirates! plays the same as the old Pirates!, except it’s easier (I liked the old Pirates!, but I was never all that good at it; meanwhile, I got a “perfect” score the second time I played the new version). What’s especially lacking is much of a reason to play the game multiple times. The quests are fixed, and the mini-games are the same, and so there’s little difference between games, except for some restrictions you might place upon yourself, such as siding with Spain instead of against it.

That being said, I played through Pirates! twice, which took somewhere around 30 hours, and I was entertained for most of the time. That’s more than I can say for a lot of the other games I’ve played in the last six months. Plus, Pirates! is a game where analytically I keep thinking I shouldn’t like it all that much, but then I play it and get absorbed, and I look up and see it’s 4am already. So Pirates! is a fun game to play, but it’s a little bit shallow and repetitive, and so while I think most people will like it, some are sure to be disappointed.