Pirate Riddlebeard

Pirate Riddlebeard is a One Paper Game in which you try to find the treasure before the others.

Each player receives one or multiple hints on where the treasure could be located. By taking smart actions and asking smart questions, you must try to figure out the hints the other players are holding, so you can pinpoint that one single square containing the treasure.

Why this project?

I was interested in “deduction boardgames with unique hints”. The idea is that there’s some riddle or problem that you can solve if you have all the information … but that information is distributed among the players. In this case: a set of different hints easily leads to the treasure, but each player only has one or two of them.

Besides that, I like creating One Paper Games to give people an accessible, cheap, special way into the world of (board)games.

What’s special?

Everything about this project turned out to be special.

• It generates a random map to play with.
• It generates the corresponding hints, which, when combined, lead to exactly one square (no more, no less).
• It can automatically put the map and hint cards into a PDF, to be printed and cut like a regular (offline) game.
• But it can also easily be played just by having some papers, pens, and one working device with Wi-Fi.

The major downside of this project is that you need to be somewhat well-versed in English to correctly understand 100% of the hints, which acts against my wishes for accessibility and ease of play. The plan is to create a follow-up version that solves this: all hints are images instead.