Pirate riddlebeard header

A One Paper Game for 1–6 pirates who each own a part of the secret riddle pointing towards a great treasure.

Ages: everyone | Difficulty: Simple | Playtime: 45 minutes

Download

What's the idea?

Pirate Riddlebeard hid a treasure in one square of the map. He left behind a set of unique hints leading to it.

But each player only receives part of that list! Figure out what the other pirates know, without giving away your own information.

Find the treasure before the others!

What do I need?

Three steps.

  • Read the rules. (Click the “Download” button. Base game is two pages.)
  • Grab some pens and papers.
  • Start the game on your phone and play!

Phone? You only need a device (and internet) at the start to generate a new game. Once setup is done, you can put it away.

Offline version? Also available in the rulebook.

Game

Input your desired settings. Click "start game".

For your first game, just pick your player count and immediately start. Once you get the hang of it, enable all the other fun elements in the settings!

The same seed (max. 20 characters) will always produce exactly the same board. Downloads a PDF with a board and hint cards for offline play.

Map

(Click to fold.)
Increases number of terrains to six. Adds stones to the map ( + hints about them). Adds roads to the map ( + hints about them). Adds landmarks to the map ( + hints about them). Creates a colored and bigger board.

Bonus Rules

(Click to fold.)
Players can receive multiple hints Adds many types of hints that are really hard to figure out.

Hire me

Are you a games publisher? I'm always open to inquiries about publishing one of my games.

Need a special board game or video game? Maybe for a birthday, school or another purpose?

Contact me! You can ask me anything—I don't bite! In fact, I've never bitten anyone.

If unsure, visit my portfolio to learn more about my work. You can also contact me through there, as I'm a registered freelance artist in the Netherlands.

Support

Enjoyed my work (or not)? Let me know what you think! Mail me at [email protected] with any feedback.

That's already a great way to support me.

Alternatives would be to buy my paid work (a win-win situation!). Or to donate through the most popular channels.

Support me on Patreon
Buy me a Coffee
Support me on Ko-Fi

Credits

Fonts? Chelsea Market for headings, Charis SIL for text, freely available on Google Fonts.

Website (boards and game)? The Phaser 3 library for programming, free and open source.

Is this magic!? Nah, sorry, it’s an algorithm. It generates a map and hints that, when combined, point to precisely one location. Most of the work actually went into balancing and finetuning: making the maps pretty and easy to look at, ensuring hints are equally valuable, removing easy guesses, etcetera.

Want to know how I made that? I’ve written articles!