According to Hoyle: What Games Did Pirates Actually Play?
Cards, dice, carved boards, and a great deal of gambling — here's how sailors and pirates killed time between storms.
ou’ve probably heard someone settle an argument with “according to Hoyle” — meaning something’s being done strictly by the rules. But who was Hoyle, and what on earth does he have to do with pirates?
Edmond Hoyle was an 18th-century Englishman who more or less invented the rulebook. His 1742 A Short Treatise on the Game of Whist laid down the law for a wildly popular card game, and he went on to write authoritative guides to backgammon, chess, and more. His name stuck so firmly to the idea of “the proper way to play” that it outlived the man and slipped into everyday English.
Here’s the part that ought to make any pirate grin. The moment Whist caught on, printers pirated it — cheap knock-off editions hit the streets before Hoyle’s own publisher could get to market, credited to “a Gentleman” instead of Hoyle. The father of the rulebook got robbed by actual book-pirates.
And Hoyle lived right in the thick of the Golden Age of Piracy. So while he was refereeing whist hands in a London drawing room, what were the sailors — and the pirates who shared their world — doing to fill the hours between watches, weather, and the next prize?
They played. And often enough, they gambled.
What do you do when you’re stuck at sea?
Picture a wooden ship in the 1720s, hundreds of miles from land. No screens, no music you didn’t make yourself, no stepping out for a walk to clear your head. Just water, weather, and a great many hours that need filling.
Work ate most of them — but not all. Accounts of 18th-century Royal Navy life show sailors spending their off-hours fishing, reading, writing, drinking, smoking, spinning yarns, and, reliably, playing games. Cards, dice, and draughts (checkers) turned up all over the lower deck. Chess was more of an officer’s habit.
Pirate crews weren’t the Navy, of course, and nobody kept a pirate ship’s activity log for historians to read. But pirates came out of that same maritime world — one where cards were already everywhere and gambling was simply part of the furniture. Give bored people some downtime and a deck of cards, and the rest tends to follow.
Cards ruled the lower deck
Cards made near-perfect shipboard entertainment: cheap, pocket-sized, and playable by two hands or a whole mess of them. Below deck, up top when the weather allowed, or in a tavern once the ship made port — a deck went anywhere.
The big one was whist, the game that made Hoyle famous. It’s a four-player partnership game about winning tricks, and it rewards a sharp memory and a good read on the table — you’re tracking what’s been played and working out what everyone’s still holding. Less a game of luck than a game of attention, which suits a crew packed into a small wooden box together for months at a stretch.
Plenty of other games were doing the rounds too — piquet, quadrille, and brag among them. And wherever cards and idle hands met, it rarely took long for money — or something worth money — to land on the table.
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Gambling, where a friendly game got expensive
For sailors, betting wasn’t always harmless fun. Real coin changed hands, and a friendly game could turn sour in a hurry. Seamen had a reputation as hard gamblers, and dice and cards were the quickest way to stake wages, plunder, or whatever else was in a man’s pocket.
Pirates, meanwhile, worked a trade where a fortune could arrive — or vanish — overnight. Take a fat prize and suddenly there’s coin and cargo to wager, which made gambling an especially lively part of the culture around piracy.
That said, don’t picture every buccaneer betting away his share by candlelight. Plenty of games were played for nothing but bragging rights and something to do while the wind made up its mind.
Dice: small, simple, made for a ship
Dice ask almost nothing of you. A couple fit in a pocket, you don’t need a table, and you can keep the game as plain or as ruthless as you like. No wonder they turned up everywhere at sea.
The famous sailors’ dice game worth knowing is Crown and Anchor, played with three special dice marked with a crown, an anchor, and the four card suits. It became strongly tied to the Royal Navy and to British merchant and fishing fleets.
A fair warning, though: historians actually argue about how old it is. Some sources trace it to the 18th century; others find no solid paper trail until the 1800s. Either way, Crown and Anchor tells us about sailor gambling culture in general — it’s not proof that Blackbeard’s crew rolled it on a barrelhead. That distinction matters when you’re sorting pirate history from pirate legend. There’s a great deal documented about “sailors” broadly, and far less about what happened on any one pirate ship.
Draughts and a sharp knife
If you grew up calling it checkers, its older name is draughts — another staple of 18th-century shipboard downtime. Unlike cards or dice it needs a board, but a board was no obstacle to men who spent all day working wood, rope, bone, and leather. Nobody had to buy one; somebody simply made one. The same hands that patched a hull could scratch a game grid into a plank — and did.
And then there’s Nine Men’s Morris
Nine Men’s Morris is ancient — older than the Caribbean pirate by thousands of years, with boards turning up everywhere from Egyptian temple stone to a buried Viking ship. It’s a strategy game on a simple grid, and that simplicity is exactly why it travelled so well: you can carve the board into almost anything.
And sailors did carve games into the objects they lived with. One surviving 18th-century Chinese tea chest has a game board cut into its underside — the sort of thing historians connect with Nine Men’s Morris and the seafarers who played it. That doesn’t prove every pirate ship carried a board, but it shows how entertainment got built right into the furniture when space was tight and boredom wasn’t.
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Backgammon brings us back to Hoyle
Backgammon closes our Hoyle loop neatly — he wrote it up too. It was already an old game by the 1700s, its folding board made it a natural traveller, and it blends real strategy with the sheer cruelty of dice. You can play a brilliant game and still get wrecked by one bad roll, or blunder along and get rescued by a lucky one. Anyone who’s ever cursed a pair of dice knows the exact feeling.
Chess, mostly an officer’s game
Chess was around, but the evidence points to it being more of an officer’s pursuit than a lower-deck one, at least aboard British naval ships. That tracks. Chess wants concentration and a board that stays put, and a pitching deck is a poor place to line up your pieces. When the sea cooperated, though, it offered a completely different kind of challenge — after a day of hauling rope and fighting weather, thinking five moves ahead is its own strange luxury.
What changed when the ship reached port?
Shipboard games were only half the story. Make port, and the options multiplied. Taverns meant food, drink, company, stories, and gambling — plus a chance to pick up new games, fresh news, and colourful characters from across the maritime world.
Ports mattered enormously to pirates, who needed places to offload plunder, take on supplies, patch their ships, and trade information. The Golden Age of Piracy didn’t happen only out at sea. Sometimes the harbour was the whole point — and the tavern was where the evening got interesting, especially with a little coin in your pocket.
Pirate game night, more or less
Put it all together and a typical evening writes itself. A few sailors around a swinging lantern. A deck of cards in one pair of hands, dice rattling in another, a carved board in play nearby. Someone’s mid-story about a voyage that may or may not have happened the way he’s telling it. Someone else is arguing the rules. And somewhere in the room sits a wager that seemed like a fine idea five minutes ago.
“According to Hoyle!” — even if Hoyle’s books were never actually aboard to settle the point. Whether the game ran on a sea chest or a tavern table, rules mattered, and they mattered most when there was money on the line.
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So gather your crew. Deal the cards. Roll the dice.
And whatever you do — play fair.
Well… mostly.
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