Best Pirate Themed Slots [2023]

Written By

Paul Cullen

Published On

May 15, 2023

Avast, ye scurvy-ridden, timber-shiverin’, online casino buccaneers. We’ve hoisted the mainsail, and plundered Davy Jones’ Locker, to dig up every piratical pun, and cutlass-wielding cliché, ever spoken under the Caribbean sun. It’s time to talk pirates and slots. Yes, folks: today, we are plumbing the nautical depths, to discover what exactly it is about these seaborne psychopaths that hoists the mizzen of your typical online casino software developer.

Pirate-themed online slots are as common as Jack Sparrow sequels. We’ve picked five hearty games and set sail on a voyage of discovery. Are they hidden treasure or just cannon fodder? Is it time for pirate-themed slots to walk the plank or should we raise a glass of grog to the genre that keeps on giving? Join is as we hoist the Jolly Roger and seek out the hidden treasure. Let’s get started: here are five of our favourite pirate-themed slots.

Top Pirate Themed Slots

We’ve sailed the high seas and swashbuckled scores of online slots, to bring you our current top five pirate-themed games. They are in no particular order but they are all worth a plunder. If you’re shipshape and ready to set sail, cast off the anchor…

Adventures of Captain Blackjack

It’s pretty obvious that these games are all going to have a lot in common: hirsute, hat-wearing, one-eyed sailors, hornpipe music, doubloon-filled treasure chests, and a surplus of Jolly Rogers. The Adventures of Captain Blackjack online slot ticks all these boxes. The game is the work of online casino software developers Just For The Win. The Stockholm-based business has been making online slots since 2016 and now boasts a widely popular and rich portfolio.

The Adventures of Captain Blackjack online slot is five reels of fun, with 20 paylines, and a crew of scurvy-ridden men and exceptionally lithe lady sailors, who look like they have just stepped out of the Christmas panto. There are swords, muskets, explosives, wilds, and a free spins bonus. The key draw with this online slot is the Kraken feature. This rewards the player with an instant jackpot win. It’s the gold you are looking for.

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8 Golden Skulls of Holly Roger Megaways

Although walking the plank is pirate fiction (they preferred a good old fashioned keel haul), there were several female buccaneers happy to slay and rob their way to infamy; check out Anne Bonny and Mary Read for two real women on a mission.

The 8 Golden Skulls of Holly Roger is six reels of female-only online slot action. It’s a Megaways game, with up to 117,649 potential paylines and collapsing reels; you can win multiples times on a single spin. The music is a K-tel take on Mike Oldfield and the casting is ‘hen night pirates’; these lady bandits put the sass into massacre.

The game is the work of Buck Stakes Entertainment, who first popped up in 2021 with this game; it’s distributed via Microgaming, ensuring these gals get to sail every ocean. The 8 Golden Skulls of Holly Roger is a great game, packed with features, scatters, and a Firepot jackpot. All aboard for action.

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Pirates Plenty: Battle for Gold

Pirates Plenty opens with a dramatic cannonball volley before transforming into a 20 payline, five-reel online slot. The game is the work of renowned developers Red Tiger Gaming and is as good as you would expect.

The game has a hidden row across the top of the screen. You need to uncover 50 map symbols to unlock this and open up an extra 10 paylines. Graphically, Pirates Plenty Battle for Gold is less character driven; the icons are cannons, ships, and Jolly Rogers.

This is game packed with bonuses to discover. There are Wild Monkeys, Scatters, and a Battle Spins Bonus round where a cannon volley, combined with an intervention from Blackbeard, all adds up to a good day on the high seas.

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Cats of the Caribbean

If you were reaching for the smelling salts at the idea of women pirates, get ready to grab the defibrillator as we go “here kitty kitty kitty” to the Cats of the Caribbean. These merciless moggies are on the hunt for Whiskas, with only a ball of wool standing in their way. The five-reel, 20 payline slot is the work of Stockholm and Helsinki-based developers Snowborn. Released in August 2022, it’s beautiful game with some wonderfully illustrated pirate cats. The background audio: the splash of waves and a shanty-style groove. All purrfect.

Cats of the Caribbean is packed with lots of features. There are wilds, wild cannons, and assorted free spin bonus rounds for Captain Claw, Captain Catnip, and Captain Red. There is also a Cat Pots bonus that comes in four flavours: Mini, Midi, Major, and Mega. The Mega pays out 10,000x the stake.

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Pixies vs Pirates

NoLimit are the enfant terrible of online casino software development. The company portfolio has slots dedicated to serial killers, prisons, cannibals, the gulag, and the morning after ‘walk of shame’. To be honest: their slots are a refreshingly sociopathic breath of fresh air. Pixies vs Pirates is definitely one of their more family friendly online slots, based on the age-old battle between pixies and pirates (really? Who knew?) Spoiler alert: basically, the pixies are getting the hump with marauding pirates stealing their pixie dust.

It’s five reels and up to 11,664 paylines of beautifully animated online slot action, set again soft-focus rigging. The music is more techno on Mogadon than sea shanty; this is refreshing. Worth playing – just to have a listen.

Pixies vs Pirates has both a wild and a nudge feature. It’s great to see a nudge in action. The bonus round pits pixie against pirate, in a fight for a respin. Basically, you choose either pixie or pirate. If your nominated warrior appears more times, you get a second wave of free spins.

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Best of the Rest Pirate-Themed Slots

Here are a few more swashbuckling slots worth plundering.

• Pirate Armada (1x2Gaming)
• Pirate Ship (WMS)
• Sails of Fortune (Relax Gaming)
• Jolly Roger 2 (Play’n GO)
• Sea of Riches (iSoftBet)
• Captain’s Quest: Treasure Island (Betsoft)
• Pirate Gold Deluxe, Pirates Bounty Megaways (Blueprint)
• Tales of Silver Megaways (iSoftBet)
• Caribbean Anne (Kalamba Games)
• Rage of the Seas (NetEnt)
• Ghost Pirates (NetEnt)
• Shifting Seas (Thunderkick)

Pirate Themed Slots – A History

With their lust for hidden treasure, bizarre character quirks, and a legacy that combines fact with folklore, pirates were always going to be a firm thematic favourite with any online casino game developer. Of course, reality is another matter. The popular, roguish, Johnny Depp-style, pirate hails from the 17^th and 18^th century, when pirates trawled the Caribbean; awash with money, scores of islands to trade booty, and very few naval ships policing the sea. It was a golden era for your ambitious brigand.

Piracy was romanticised with the publication of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, as well as Captain Charles Johnson’s: A General History of the Pyrates. The latter book profiling the likes of Blackbeard and Calico Jack, with a mix of awe, fear, and admiration; legends were born.

English pirates attacking French and Spanish ships were heroes. Plunder was shared with the governors of Caribbean islands. Myths and icons were born. In truth, they were thieving, murdering, psychopaths who knew how to sail a ship. Think ISIS of the high seas. Whatever the fact, the fiction is a glorious source of raw material for film, music, and online slots. On the sea of piracy, you seek gold and struggle to survive. It’s very similar to a typical night out in Las Vegas.

Sights and Sounds of Pirate Themed Slots

The truth is: when it comes to creating online slots, developers are often looking for a short cut. Historical accuracy is not a priority. Let’s face it: one of the games reviewed features a crew of cats, another is a battle between pixies and pirates. Iconography on nearly all pirate games takes its cue from Disney films and Treasure Island. Most pirates would have been looting food, furs, medicines, and the like; wooden chests, groaning with golden coins were a rare thing.

Online slot pirate icons typically feature: cutlasses, barrels of rum, pieces of eight, doubloons, muskets, cannons, treasure, a map, a chest of coins, an anchor, assorted pirates, and – of course – a skull and crossbones aka the Jolly Roger. Every year, on September 19^th, it is talk like a pirate day. The drawn out ‘arrrrr’ has its origins in a west country accent. This is basically all down to Robert Newton’s performance as Long John Silver, in Treasure Island, than any kind of actual reality.

Pop culture’s take on pirate talk has been inspired by this. Johnny Depp’s Jack Sparrow is on trend, with his garbled pirate gibberish. As for music, most pirate games go with a good old sea shanty – and that is true to form. But never let the facts stand in the way of five reels of online casino action. If it’s treasure ye seek, me hearties, ye will find it within these pages. Hoist the anchor, fly the colours, and let’s leave the landlubbers alone.

Developers

With so many pirate games available online, it’s almost impossible to determine what developer is the doyen of the swashbuckling genre. Here’s a quick insight into the most popular pirate-themed games from the planet’s leading online casino game creators.

NetEnt

The most popular pirate game in the NetEnt portfolio is Ghost Pirates. It’s a five-reel, 243 payline game, and one of NetEnt’s oldest slots. Another game to watch out for is Rage of the Seas. Expect quality from the home of Gonzo.

Microgaming

Next, we head to the Isle of Man, home to the mighty Microgaming. This iconic business has nearly 1,000 online slots in its portfolio. Pirate highlights include Pirates Paradise, Boom Pirates, and Gold Away.

Playtech

Also headquartered on the Isle of Man is Playtech. Another giant, with a huge roster of games. Pirate-themed options include Chests of Plenty and the Captain’s Treasure; available as both a regular game and as progressive jackpot.

IGT

IGT has a heritage that reaches back to 1960s Las Vegas. Highlights in their pirate roster include Capt. Quid’s treasure Chest and Skeleton Key. Expect old school-style action; dependable and safe.

In Summary

When online betting first began, it was simply a case of replicating the real-world betting experience online. At Intertops, we opened up the US market for sports betting. It was controversial, and legally ‘grey’, but it gave American punters the opportunity to bet on their favourite teams and sports.

Intertops was one of the first online betting sites to host online casino games. At the time, Microgaming was the only real supplier. The game they offered us was Cash Splash; a classic of its genre. This was quickly followed by five more games: Golden Dragon, Martian Money, Pharaoh’s Fortune, Trick or Treat, and Pirate’s Paradise. So, there you have it: a pirate-themed game was in play from the very beginning. Microgaming was simply replicating the most popular genres available at any typical Las Vegas strip casino – and pirates are always a great option.

Let’s face it: There is a 3,000-room hotel in Las Vegas called Treasure Island, where they used to perform a live pirate show – the Battle of Buccaneer Bay – twice a day. Pirates are the perfect theme for any online casino. What’s not to like? You’ve got hidden treasure, maps, swashbuckling characters, and so much more. Of course, the irony is that all these stereotypes are really just the product of Treasure Island and Hollywood.

Developers have to keep churning the online casino games, to keep players engaged and coming back. Today, there are slots about literally everything, from prisons and serial killers, to zombies and acid house. Pirates is the trope that keeps on giving – when it’s not stealing everything you’ve got…