This game is exactly what I was looking for, quick to start easy to play but sturdy enough to run many epic adventures.

Your ragtag crew of pirates have just used a magic compass to find an island where the treasure was hidden in a lost ruin. Finding it booby trapped and containing one monkey's paw too many, you made your escape, scuffling with a voodoo witch doctor and his minions. Temporarily escaping the dark medicine man, your crew makes their way back to their ship where they are accosted by a giant octopus that the witch doctor has some control over. Firing back upon the great beast with your ship's cannons, you finally manage to get away, only to be set upon by an opposing treasure hunting crew, beginning ship to ship combat.

This is just one of the exciting adventures you could be having if you were playing Yarr!, a rules light pen and paper roleplaying game from BD Games. Yarr! has two main things going for it that should be all you need to know. First, it's about PIRATES. Second, it calls itself Rules Light, and unlike many others that use that title, it actually is. Yarr! gives you all the tools to play a campaign in the golden age of piracy that never was. Yarr! isn't about historical accuracy; it's about fun games with fun stories. Yarr! would be better used to run stories like Pirates of Caribbean or the Pirates of Dark Water rather than either something very historically accurate or something outlandish, such as the Pirates of Penzance (though if your Referee were creative and musically inclined enough, I bet you could make the latter work). Yarr! has rules for heroic feats, sort-of-magic abilities, strange beasties, weird antagonists, and of course all the loot needed to put sixteen men on that dead man's chest.

However, it's Rules Light. What does that mean? Well, it means that the rules are basic and there to support fun and story, not bog everything down in minutiae and constraints. The rules are light enough that beginners and kids will have no problem picking up Yarr! and jumping into a journey as their favorite heroic sailors. Yet at the same time, the rules feel complete - anything you'd need rules for is in the manual, and the few things that might come up outside of them are easily improvised by the Referee or by simply altering the title or flavor of an existing rule. The Yarr! rules are simple enough for anyone to pick up. If you were looking to introduce someone to the land of pen and paper games, this isn't a bad one to start a player on.

What you have in the manual are basic archetypes for character classes, skills, hand to hand combat rules, ship to ship combat rules, loot, equipment, a sample bestiary, and more. But even better than all that is even a quick read through the manual will give you ideas for adventures. While much of the loot and monsters hearken back to movies and books we've read, putting them in different ways gives easy ideas for new adventures, new treasure, new piracy! Plus, the ideas are easy enough to shift so that an Atlantean becomes a mystic, your marine becomes a templar, etc and accommodates any idea you have. It's called Yarr! and makes you think of pirates of the new world, but everything is here for you to play the adventures of a pirate like Sinbad with his own Harryhausen style gallery of monsters and wonders.

Whether it's just you and your friends exploring the age of piracy with full on pirate lingo or if it's a game to play with your own young budding gamer children, Yarr! is a worthwhile RPG to pick up.

'Rules Light' doesn't mean that they have neglected the rules, just that they are streamlined and unobtrusive, unlikely to get in the way of best-quality pirate role-playing action!

You get everything that you will need to unleash a band of pirates across the ocean quickly and simply. Characters are generated by describing them, the only numbers you need are level, armour class and hit points. The rest flows from the class and special abilities that you choose for your pirate. Accompanying notes encourage you to enable creativity (especially if you have youngsters trying their first hand at role-playing) by letting players have any ability that they can articulate, or be of a different class that they come up with, showing you how to assign skills etc. in a balanced way by mixing existing rules as appropriate.

Combat, indeed any task resolution, is handled simply as well with an eye to keeping the action (and the excitement) flowing... and yet there is scope for plenty of detail if that is how you like to play, special moves, different damage depending on weapons and much, much more.

There's pirate ship-to-ship combat as well as the up close and personal variety, which can be conducted in a fast, abstract manner or in as much detail as would satisfy any board wargamer's heart, depending on what you and your group prefer. There are also some beasts, and the scope for magic, undead, and other fantasy staples. Although these are presented as inherent, you could excise them quite easily if it's 'real' pirates you are after rather than the fantasy variety. Given the apparent Caribbean setting (this is assumed rather than mentioned outright), there's Voodoo as well. And legendary monsters like the Kraken to come and wrap its tentacles around the pirate ship.

There's a surprisingly sensible section on Pirate Talk, providing some proper nautical jargon and pirate terms as well as pointers to develop the correct silly accent if you want to go Arrr all the time. Details of special treasures, a detailed skill list and a selection of character sheets round this out.

Don't be deluded by 'rules light' or a preponderance of pirate talk, this is a solid, quite elegant, role-playing game based around that ever-popular thing, the pirate in the age of sail. If that appeals, do try this out. You'll have a blast.

After one read thru I am very happy with this game, and it is a complete role playing game, i was not left with that feeling of incompleteness that I usually get from games claiming to be rules lite. I love pirates and have been hooked on them for over forty years now, this game fits the bill exactly , my search may be over for this genre! (naw , im a sucker for all things piratical lol). The rules are clear and flow well , theres just enuff crunch to add spice to the game, yet its not enuff to interrupt the game or turn it into a math contest. Chargen, skills, equipment, spells , monsters (for them that want a fantasy game or supernatural elements added, historical guides, treasure guides, adventure guides... everything that we used get in a box decades ago , well done! I would love to see some modules as well .

the PDF is EVERYTHING you need to run the game for both the players and the GM. This system can easily be supplemented with additional rpg goodness to extend the pirate adventures out. The required resources are light, you can run the game with 6 sided dice, which is nice for those who aren't invested in the dice ruled rpg world. It also has rules to handle using minatures too in case that is your thing. It feels like it was writen to bring in new people to world of tabletop gaming, but it was also writen for those Veterans who want to explore the high seas with a light set of rules. This makes a great 1 session, or 5 session game system :D

If there isn't enough pirate goodness in you're rpg gaming you can't go wrong with Yarr! It stays true to form of both a easy light rpg in everyone's favourite traditional format but not so light that you feel like you have to make up rules just to get a complete rpg. Everything you need is in Yarr! With the provided character sheets you are ready to go in minutes.