The Restarting Pirates CSG Project

Ever since I joined the Pirates CSG online community in 2011 and learned that the game was out of print, I had wondered what it would take to bring it back to life. I remember reading the iconic “how did they do it” and petition threads at Miniature Trading around then.

All the New Ship and Sea Creature types for my Relaunch of Pirates Constructible Strategy Game (through November 2025)

WHY Restart Pirates CSG?

You might wonder “WHY should the game be brought back?” To restore it to its glory. To bring new game pieces to life that pay homage to the incredible history of the Age of Sail. To chase an “impossible dream”. To fulfill a life dream and start an entrepreneurial venture with terrible odds of success. To dream big because I wasn’t meant to live an average and boring life. To dare to go against the status quo and do something that probably no one else would be willing to do. To top off my obsession with the game with a project so large and difficult that it even eclipses my insane playing history of thousands of hours of gameplay and ludicrous campaign games the likes of which had never been seen before. To evoke feelings of intense nostalgia and joy in the core audience of fans. To admit that a board game from the past deserves new life instead of just making a similar copycat game that doesn’t need to exist. To bring new sets into existence that myself and others can use in games. To be a pirate!

The Beginnings of an Epic Journey

In 2015 I began getting more serious about my passion for the game. That year was the birth of Pirates with Ben, though in Weebly form as a free website. I also contacted a lawyer who was supposed to be pro bono (according to a website) who hung up when I inquired about doing legal research – possibly the first of many failures and setbacks.

In 2021, the Restarting Pirates Project actually began. I formed a “supergroup” of fans who I thought could help me bring the game back. A small portion of those did help in a substantial way, especially in those early years (2021-2023) when I was too busy to work on the relaunch very much. Pirates of the Golden Seas was created in spreadsheet form, as a standalone set to reintroduce the game to the world. Many edits to the original rules were made and playtested along with the new game pieces.

Making It Happen

In 2024 I began working on my Pirates Relaunch full-time, sometimes almost exclusively in some parts of the year. At this point my whole life was about Pirates CSG. The first 5 months of 2024 were a slog of 3D print troubleshooting, decal cutting issues, getting my website ready for ecommerce, and learning Adobe Illustrator to complete the artwork and files for the Golden Seas set. On June 1st I launched The Store at Pirates with Ben. June 7th was the first public sharing of my newsletter, The Pirate Press. On June 8th I made the biggest announcement of my Pirates CSG “career” – that the game was coming back, with a new set to be released in limited quantity later that summer. After many dozens of hours printing and decaling, I finally finished making the first 10 homemade copies of Golden Seas just barely in time for the release date of August 10th (8/10/2024). These initial 10 copies sold out in just about one hour, proving to me that there was demand for the relaunch.

From there I knew I needed a better production method, as 3D printing and decaling was far too tedious and time consuming. The goal was to achieve “medium-scale” production, which in reality turns out to be still quite small scale in the grand scheme of things. This would be sheet printing on styrene, with laser cutting to cut out the cards and shapes from those sheets. Thus began one of the most frustrating parts of the project. The nightmare of finding an adequate supplier lasted for months. Laser cutting didn’t fare much better, as the laser cutters I have access to are somewhat older community machines that sometimes needed significant maintenance/repairs/etc. Various testing occurred with mixed results. Inkscape files had to be reworked many times to accommodate the different requirements of different print companies. After about 3 months, I finally had some misprinted (bad front-back alignment) styrene in hand. Laser cutting it was a disaster – sheets too big, and the laser beam or ink quality caused a nasty browned ink tacky particle issue that ruined the artwork on the cards somewhat and made them unsellable in my opinion. I figured it was the specific UV ink used so I pivoted to companies that had water-based latex ink printers. However, I later discovered that it was likely more of an issue with the laser beam itself, as a different laser was able to cut UV printed styrene without having the same issue with browning and tackiness.

The print company issues extended into 2025 – the one great supplier I had doubled their price at one point because of how hard it was for them to print on styrene. Many others were tried to no avail, usually having issues getting adequate front-back alignment (the project requires printing precision, which is often unnecessary in many signage/large format jobs). Eventually the search got desperate as I began contacting print companies in Los Angeles, having already contacted all the 191+ print companies I could find in Vegas without a good long-term solution. Better suppliers were eventually found locally and the laser cutter worked well for most of 2025, so around June 2025 I finally had reliable inventory of most of my core products. That realm of the project (sheet printing + laser cutting) started in August 2024, so getting all of that right (including many aspects of files and communication/etc not discussed here) took about 10 months.

Many other issues came up over the long journey to consistently bring the game to market. Website issues, store issues, file glitches, and business difficulties all cost me many hours that I wish I could have spent on developing new products. Below you can see an image gallery of the project, showing the journey of Restarting Pirates CSG.

A Pirates’ Life

I am essentially “everything” for this project, and have been working very hard on a huge variety of tasks since late 2023. For example, these are some of the “hats” I wear for the relaunch of Pirates: business owner, game piece designer, artist/graphic designer, playtester, videographer, photographer, website manager, product developer, product manager, blogger, copywriter, marketer, salesman, logistics/fulfillment, procurement, production manager, quality control+assurance, social media manager, accountant, publisher, etc.

The current iteration of the business is the Buccaneer’s Booty Box subscription model, where a few dozen dedicated pirates have signed up to keep the game in print. A Mega Pack a Month should be a sustainable product model going forward, allowing new releases to continue as the game stays in print. I am very grateful to both my collaborators who helped me early in the project and to my subscribers whose treasure contributions are fueling the game’s present and future.

To victory at sea!

Ben