Gain extra 100 Gold from pillaging Trade Route.) Passive Ability: Letters of Marque (All ports owned by your patron civilization are permanently revealed to you.Active Ability: Bring Her Home (Capture a badly damaged enemy ship for the Privateer's patron in exchange for Gold and Infamy.Passive Ability: Fightin' is What We Do Best (Grants additional Gold whenever a unit engages in combat.).Active Ability: Walk the Plank (Instantly defeat a badly damaged enemy ship to grant +5 Combat Strength and +3 Movement to all units for 5 turns.).Destroying or capturing a colonial or buccaneer unit (5 points).Destroying or capturing a pirate player's unit (10 points).Sinking Infamous Pirates (20-50 points).Capturing a ship as the Privateers (5 points).Revealing hexes as the Swashbucklers (1 point for every 50 hexes).Plundering a Trade Route or Improvement (1 point).Plundering a Building or District (2 points).There are three types of score: Treasure, Infamy, and Fightin'. There is only one way to win Pirates: surviving until the turn limit, at which point you must have the most total score.
The flagships in the scenario are marked with the Armada icon (as well as Infamous Pirates). The Flagship ability makes it immune to captures and losing due to mutiny. The player starts with a single Brigantine, which has a special Flagship ability and can be considered your main ship for combat. The scenario can be played on the handcrafted Caribbean Islands map or a random Pirate Islands map. Pirates cannot found cities, so their units have powerful self-sustaining effects to compensate for the inability to build more. The gameplay is based on collecting treasure and Infamy with the help of special Relics that impart special effects onto your ships, while avoiding the Spanish, English, French and Dutch navies. The Pirates scenario is centered around four playable pirate factions on their quest to obtain riches, and is heavily influenced by Sid Meier's Pirates!.