Buccaneer (board game)

Buccaneer is a British board game created by Geoffrey Bull and published by the games company Waddingtons across a run that stretched from the 1930s into the 1980s. The game is built around a pirate theme in which players compete to gather treasure said to be hidden on Treasure Island, moving pieces representing ships and crews across a map board toward the richest hauls while contending with rival buccaneers. Beyond its own long commercial life, Buccaneer holds a notable place in board game history because Bull's creation of it is credited with inspiring his next-door neighbour, Anthony E. Pratt, who went on to devise the board game that would eventually be published as Cluedo. That lineage connects a comparatively obscure pirate-themed treasure hunt to one of the best known mystery board games of the twentieth century, and it is the detail for which Buccaneer is most often remembered by game historians even though the game itself enjoyed decades of independent publication under Waddingtons.