A lot of people seem to hate Pirate Ship, even in 2p games. I've never been that sure why; I often find it easy to counter it: Just find ways to get money besides Treasure. This approach relies heavily on the rest of the board having money Actions, but it works very well where applicable.
This game is about as pure an example of my counter-Pirate-Ship style as there is. Usually the table isn't
this favorable to my approach, but it often works nonetheless.
Here's the log. You can actually pretty much see what happened from the final state of the game:
Not a Cylon wins!
Worker's Villages, Native Villages, and Curses are all gone.
cards in supply: Ambassador, Chancellor, Mountebank, Native Village, Outpost, Pirate Ship, Rabble, Royal Seal, Treasury, and Worker's Village
Default card selection was used.
----------------------
#1 Not a Cylon: 25 points (4 Provinces and an Estate); 30 turns
opening: Silver / Ambassador
[26 cards] 6 Native Villages, 6 Worker's Villages, 3 Chancellors, 3 Rabbles, 2 Ambassadors, 1 Mountebank, 1 Estate, 4 Provinces
#2 Haug-MSS: 0 points (a Province, 4 Estates, and 10 Curses); 30 turns
opening: Pirate Ship / Ambassador
[70 cards] 4 Native Villages, 4 Worker's Villages, 3 Ambassadors, 3 Pirate Ships, 3 Rabbles, 3 Treasuries, 1 Chancellor, 1 Outpost, 27 Coppers, 6 Silvers, 4 Estates, 1 Province, 10 Curses
----------------------
trash: a Silver and 3 Coppers
I open Silver/Ambassador/Ambassador. Once it's clear he's going hard Pirate Ship, I look at the board and see that it's feasible to go
completely Treasureless. Mountebank, Chancellor, and Treasury all provide money, and Native Village is easy to obtain and will serve both to chain together the terminals and to save them up for bigger buys. The Ambassadors get rid of all my Treasure and clog his deck, and the Mountebank provides money and also clogs his deck. (He ends up with no fewer than
27 Coppers and all the Curses.) I wind up getting just three Chancellors and a Mountebank for money; with so many NVs, I could easily stow them until I could play them all in one turn for a Provice, and his deck was getting so slow that it was okay to spend three turns building up (especially if I get to double-Ambassador in the meantime).
The game takes a while (30 turns and lots of extra clicking for Chancellor and NV), but I figure it wasn't my idea to make it dangerous to buy things the easy way :-) (And it would've taken longer had my opponent not thought to remind me to end it on piles by buying the last Worker's Village … hurp derp …)
Note that, according to Popular Buys on councilroom.com, even though I do win when I skip Pirate Ship and lose when I buy it, my Effect Without is pretty strongly negative (-1.18); by my understanding, this means other people actually do better than me when they skip the Ship. So just remember, much as Pirate Ship may sometimes irritate the piss out of you (especially in multiplayer), it's very counterable and definitely
not a must-buy.