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Pirate's Folly
Saved games stay in this browser only.
About the game
Pirate's Folly hands you a small ship, a blank chart and a sea nobody has sailed before. Every world is generated from an eight-digit seed: the same seed always makes the same ocean, so you can share a good one with a friend, and a new seed makes a new world with its own coastlines, ports and islands.
Somewhere around the centre of that world lie the Nine Isles of Legend, each guarded and each hiding a fragment of a chart. Collect all nine, survive the last fleet and the treasure is yours. Getting there takes money, a sturdier ship and a crew, and that is where the rest of the game comes in.
The ports are the heart of it. Buy rum, silk, spice and cannon where they are cheap and sell where they are dear, repair the hull, hire crew and listen to the tavern, which points you to the nearest port and the nearest unclaimed isle. The shipyard sells armour plating, better sails, long guns and a dinghy, and the dinghy opens up the islands: land on any beach and explore it on foot, at twice the zoom, to dig up chests, salvage cargo and fend off snakes and skeletons.
Out at sea, new waters may hide pirates or storms, merchants offer cheap goods or a tempting strongbox, and in the deepest water there is a rare kraken. The whole game is hand-written Game Boy assembly by Spencer Churchill, released free and open source in 2026.
Playing it here
This is a homebrew game made for the Game Boy: a new game by an independent developer, not a commercial release. It runs here in binjgb, a Game Boy emulator compiled to WebAssembly, in its Game Boy Color version. Click Play, press Enter at the title, then X on the seed screen to sail the default sea or edit the digits first.
The game saves to the cartridge's battery memory whenever you dock or leave a port, and that save is kept in this browser; Enter on the seed screen continues it. F2 also saves the emulator state and F4 brings it back. A gamepad works too.
Controls
| Key | Game Boy button | Action |
|---|---|---|
| Arrow keys | Control Pad | sail, walk ashore, choose in menus, edit the seed |
| X | A | new voyage; dock, fire cannons, go ashore; dig, reboard; confirm |
| Z | B | fire the pistol ashore; back out of port menus |
| Enter | Start | open the chart; continue a saved game |
| Shift or Ctrl | Select | new random seed; mute the sound |
| F2 / F4 | — | save / load the emulator state |
A few things worth knowing
Ease off the arrows. The ship has momentum, and ramming a wild coast costs hull. Dock beaches, the ones with plank piers, are soft.
Watch the bottom line. It shows your position, hull (H), gold (G) and the fragments found (F). At zero hull you wreck, lose half your gold and wake up in open water with a patched ship.
Ask in the tavern. It knows the nearest port and the nearest isle you have not claimed yet, which saves a lot of blind sailing.
Buy the dinghy early. A fragment only comes out of the ground after its guardian is sunk, and you have to walk to the X to dig it up.
The chart pays. Every new cell you sail through is inked on the map (Enter), and a fully charted sea is worth a bounty.
Credits and licence
Pirate's Folly is by Spencer Churchill: code, graphics, sound driver and design. It is free software under the MIT licence. The music is six traditional sea shanties, in the public domain: Drunken Sailor, Wellerman, Spanish Ladies, Blow the Man Down, Rolling Home and Leave Her Johnny. The licence text is linked from this page.