From realistic sail physics to pirate trading empires: about a dozen open-source nautical games and engines on GitHub, grouped into three styles of play, with notes on which ones run in your browser and which are worth reading the code.
In the spirit of Uncharted Waters: buy ships, run trade routes, and play the great powers against each other.
The engine behind Sea Dogs, Pirates of the Caribbean and Age of Pirates, open-sourced with the copyright holder's permission. The repo contains the engine only, not the games, and has been archived as read-only since April 29, 2024.
The companion repo sd-teho-public holds the scripts and config for Sea Dogs: To Each His Own. Pair it with the assets from the Steam release and you can run the game from source.
A web-based reimagining of the 1986 shipping classic Ports of Call. The world map has 30 real ports, and the ship broker sells 10 classes of vessel, from $1M coastal traders to $60M supertankers.
On arrival you steer the ship into harbor against the clock. There is also fleet management, random events at sea, and save/load.
Set on the Spanish Main in 1640, with England, France, Spain and Holland at war. You climb the ranks, grow your fleet and crew, hunt treasure and fight off enemies. Heavily influenced by Sid Meier's Pirates!
Free, no ads, no in-game purchases. It began as a PHP game in the early 2000s and has since been rebuilt on a modern web stack.
A turn-based seafaring and trading game. Guide your ships around the islands to find goods, build ships and trade with the Kingdom settlements, while staying clear of pirates that hunt cargo ships with the wind.
Games that care about wind angle, sail trim and boat speed. Good for learning how sailing works, or how to model it.
Teaches you to sail a dinghy, one lesson at a time. It models real sailing rather than arcade physics: wind direction, points of sail, the no-go zone, tacking, gybing and crew balance.
The whole model (no-go half-angle, speed polar, trim efficiency, the tack/gybe state machine, scoring and coaching copy) is specified in docs/sailing-spec.md and then implemented faithfully in code. The spec is worth reading on its own.
Built for a TU Delft course competition themed "Dark Ages". You sail a Viking ship through shifting winds with nothing but a sun compass to navigate by.
The README documents the speed formula the author found by trial and error, cos(0.3θ² + 0.5θ − 1.4) + 0.8, where θ is the angle between wind and heading, and explains storing the land/sea map in a numpy array for performance.
Collect a sailor's scattered belongings with your little boat. W/S trims the mainsail, A/D steers. Calm and unhurried.
Quick to pick up and small enough to pull apart over a weekend.
A simple pirate ship shooter. Arrow keys raise and lower sail and turn to port or starboard; C and V fire the port and starboard cannons. Art comes from Kenney's open-source Pirate Pack.
A multiplayer ship battle game made with GameMaker.
A pirate party game: booty, plunder, and shouting at your friends.
Nothing in this group matches the filter.
Plays Chinese-language DOS games in the browser, including Koei's Uncharted Waters and Uncharted Waters: New Horizons (Daikoukai Jidai I and II). These are packaged original games, not open-source remakes.