Games like Sid Meier's Pirates! for kids

Sid Meier's Pirates!

You're a privateer in the Caribbean with a letter of marque from Spain, England, France or the Dutch. Sail where you like: fight ships, duel captains, dig up treasure, rescue your lost family, and retire when you're rich or old. The game gets harder as your captain ages, which keeps it fresh. For a family, it's the gold standard: exciting, never grim, and full of real places.

Port Royale 4

The trading half of Pirates!, grown into a whole economy: set up trade routes between Caribbean towns, build up colonies, and fight turn-based sea battles against pirates and rival nations.

Sea of Thieves

The most fun you can have sailing a pirate ship with friends: everyone has a job, from steering to bailing water. It's a real crew game rather than a strategy game, and best with teenagers you know.

Uncharted Waters: New Horizons

Set in the Age of Exploration, in the early 1500s, it lets you trade, explore the coasts of the world, hunt treasure or turn pirate, with six characters to choose from. Slow by today's standards, and lovely to share with a curious kid and a map.

Silver & Sails

Where Pirates! makes you a privateer, Silver & Sails makes you the merchant captain the pirates are chasing. It's 1715: buy goods where they're cheap, sail real routes with the trade winds, and sell where they're dear, across 79 real ports. Blackbeard, Black Bart and Calico Jack are out there. Sea battles are timed broadsides you aim yourself, and boarding is a sword fight of blocks and strikes, or you can let fights resolve on their own. There's a flag designer, a named crew, fishing, storms, treasure maps and rare sea monsters, and the goal is to retire to your own island.

For younger players it can read every screen aloud, walks them through their first trade, and has an optional mate who gives advice.

Where it falls short: it's a trading game first, so there's less swashbuckling than in Pirates!, and no 3D. Buying your island is part of the $4.99 unlock.

It also handles history honestly, including the slave trade, and the website has researched pages on the real pirates, ports, goods and ships. There's a free classroom guide for teachers.

Pirate games that aren't for kids

Two well-loved games come up in every "games like Pirates!" list and are worth knowing about before a child asks for them.

• Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag (Ubisoft, 2013) has some of the best ship battles ever made, and it's rated M for Mature.
• Sunless Sea (Failbetter Games, 2015) is a dark, wonderfully written game of trading and exploring an underground sea, rated T for violence, blood and sexual content. One for adults.

Questions

What age is Sid Meier's Pirates! for? The PC version is rated E for everyone, the Wii version E10+, and Common Sense Media suggests 10 and up. Most kids who can read the menus enjoy it.

Is there a pirate game with no online chat? Pirates!, Port Royale 4, Uncharted Waters and Silver & Sails are all single-player, with no chat. Sea of Thieves is online with strangers.

Is there a pirate game with real history? Pirates! and Port Royale 4 use real places. Silver & Sails uses 79 real ports and the real pirates of the 1710s, with a history note in every port and sourced articles on the website.