• PIRATE PATIENCE™ — THE BACK STORY

    A storm, a pack of cards and a bottle of rum...

    Pirate Patience™ didn't begin in a design studio.

    There was no business plan, no artwork and certainly no grand ambition to create a card game.

    It began around 2022/23, aboard the staff boat at Dilham Hall Canoe Hire.

    At the time, I was running the canoe field and sometimes I stayed aboard the boat if i finished late and had to start early.

    Entertainment was fairly limited.

    There was no television.

    The radio barely worked.

    So evenings generally involved two things: playing cards and rum.

    THE NIGHT OF THE STORM

    One evening the weather turned horrible.

    I was on my own, the wind was howling and the boat was being knocked about against a tree.

    At around 11:30pm, sleep clearly wasn't going to happen.

    So I got up, poured myself a tall glass of rum, found a pack of playing cards and

    decided that a game of patience was going to be my “see through the storm” entertainment.

    I started playing Round the Clock Patience.

    About twenty minutes later, I had a thought:

    Could I turn this into a game for two people?

    I started experimenting.

    Ten cards each.

    One deck.

    No picture cards.

    No Jokers.

    After a bit of messing around...

    it worked......Sort of.

    THEN AQUAWOMAN ARRIVED...

    Two nights later, AquaWoman arrived to help at the canoe field.

    Naturally, I wanted to show her my new — and still completely unnamed — patience game.

    So we headed back to the boat, dealt the cards and started playing.

    There was only one problem........ It was boring.

    It worked, but there wasn't enough to do.

    It was mostly chance. Get lucky with the cards and you won.

    So, over the next few hours — accompanied by a certain amount of rum — we started changing things.

    Picture cards began finding their way into the game.

    We wrote on cards.

    Rules were invented.

    Rules were changed.

    Then came the accident that changed everything.

    ENTER THE KRAKEN

    I was winning.........A lot.....

    AquaWoman was becoming increasingly suspicious of my apparently miraculous ability to shuffle the cards in my own favour.

    There may even have been accusations of dodgy shuffling.

    Naturally, I decided the best way to prove my innocence was to show off.

    I attempted one of those impressive casino-style splash shuffles across the table.

    And accidentally dragged a Joker into the deck..... Eventually it appeared.

    AquaWoman looked at it, then looked at me.

    “Well, what the hell does the Joker do?
    And what is this game called?”

    I hadn't got a clue.

    Then I looked at the table.

    Sitting there was the bottle of rum we'd been drinking.

    Kraken.

    So, thinking very quickly, I replied:

    “Oh... that's the Kraken!”

    And because the ten cards in front of each player had effectively become our ships — with a top deck and a bottom deck — there was only one suitably devastating thing a Kraken could do.

    It sinks everyone's ship's.

    And then came the second question.

    What was the game called?

    Again, there had never been a name.

    But now we had ships.

    We had a Kraken.

    We had rum.

    And the whole thing had started with a game of patience.

    There could really only be one answer.

    “Arrrgh... Pirate Patience.”

    And just like that...Pirate Patience™ had a name.

    PIRATE PATIENCE SETS SAIL... THEN DISAPPEARS

    For the next four or five months, we kept playing.

    Friends joined us from time to time and, somewhere along the way, our slightly ridiculous boat game became surprisingly addictive.

    We changed things as we played, tried different ideas and kept notes on my phone.

    Even the name wasn't quite right yet — the note was saved as “Pirate Patients” rather than Pirate Patience.

    More so a spelling error from my rum fuelled typing skills probably.

    But then life moved on.

    We parted ways with the canoe hire, I returned to plumbing, gas and oil work full-time,

    and there simply wasn't the time for our little pirate card game anymore.

    The cards stopped coming out.

    And the Pirate Patients note on my phone slowly slipped further and further down the list... Until eventually it disappeared into the archive.

    And that might very easily have been the end of Pirate Patience.

    THEN CAME MAY 2026...

    276 KILOS OF BOILER CHANGED EVERYTHING

    On 26th May 2026, while working as a heating engineer, I injured my back manually moving a 276kg oil boiler.

    I struggled through that week and into the next. Movement was incredibly difficult, and instead of improving, the pain was getting worse.

    Eventually came the doctor's appointment, followed by an X-ray the next day — and news I really wasn't expecting.

    I was told that a muscle had been badly ripped on my rib cage.

    The advice was clear: I needed to get moving and standing again, with sports therapy and other treatment to follow.

    If that didn't work, I was warned that surgery could potentially be the next step, option 2.

    Suddenly, life had become very different. I was spending much of my time horizontal, in pain, surviving on around four hours' sleep if I was lucky

    and desperately looking for things to keep my mind occupied.

    And that's when something rather strange happened.

    PIRATE PATIENCE COMES BACK FROM DAVEY JONES LOCKER!

    Around the beginning of June, I decided to do one of those jobs nobody ever really wants to do.

    Clear out my phone.

    Old photographs.
    Old invoices.
    Old notes.
    Anything I didn't need anymore.

    Delete. Delete. Delete.

    Then I came across a note called:

    “Pirate Patients”

    I had absolutely no idea what it was.

    My finger was pretty much ready to hit delete.

    But for some reason, I opened it first.

    And there it was.

    The notes from that ridiculous little card game AquaWoman and I had played aboard the staff boat years earlier.

    The ten cards.

    The rules.

    The picture cards.

    The Kraken.

    Pirate Patience.

    And suddenly I wasn't thinking about my back.

    I was thinking:

    Could I actually turn this into a real game?

    I couldn't do much physically.

    But I could think.

    I could design.

    I could experiment.

    I could learn.

    And, perhaps most importantly at that particular moment...

    I had time, lots of time, no sleep and a very frustrated working enganeering brain...

    Boom.

    I had a project.

    AND THIS TIME, IT WASN'T GOING BACK IN THE ARCHIVE

    What happened next became a bit of an obsession.

    The old rules came back out. Ideas that had worked on the boat stayed. Others were changed or disappeared completely.

    The ten numbered positions became the decks of our pirate ships. The action cards developed. Characters began to appear. Rules were tested, rewritten and tested again.

    Then came the artwork.

    I had to learn how to turn the pictures in my head into something that could actually exist on a playing card.

    One card became another.

    One hour became ten.

    Ten became a hundred.

    And the forgotten note called “Pirate Patients” slowly became Pirate Patience™.

    FROM A STORM TO A DECK OF CARDS

    Looking "BACK", Pirate Patience has had a rather strange journey.

    It was conceived during a storm, aboard a staff boat with no television, a barely functioning radio, a pack of playing cards and a glass of rum.

    It got its Kraken because I accidentally shuffled a Joker into the deck.

    It got its name because AquaWoman demanded to know what on earth we were playing — while on a boat, while a bottle of Kraken Rum happened to be sitting on the table.

    We played it.

    We forgot about it.

    And almost three years later, while clearing rubbish from my phone during one of the most difficult periods I'd experienced physically in my life....

    I very nearly deleted it altogether.

    Instead, I opened it.

    And that little misspelled note gave me something to concentrate on when I desperately needed something to occupy my mind.

    Pirate Patience™ wasn't created by a marketing department.

    It grew out of a storm, friendship, accidents, laughter, frustration, a bit of rum, a badly timed back injury — and one very lucky decision not to press DELETE.

    And somehow...

    And somehow, It ended up becoming a real game.....WITH A REAL BACK STORY! 🏴‍☠️

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