Pirate Borg vs Cy_Borg - undead seas or neon streets?

The short answer

Pick Pirate Borg if you want horror with salt on it: cursed treasure, ghost ships, and a crew of doomed sailors boarding a galleon while the dead climb up the hull. It is the more classic campaign game of the two, with light naval combat rules and a sandbox map you can actually sail. Pick Cy_Borg if you want rage: broke, nano-infested punks taking one more job in a megacity that is actively trying to kill them. It is louder, faster and meaner, built for short, brutal heists. Both games run on the same Mörk Borg engine, so the rules will not make this decision for you. The world will.

What these two games have in common

Both are standalone games built on Mörk Borg, the Swedish apocalypse game by Pelle Nilsson and Johan Nohr that looks like a doom metal album and plays like one. Pirate Borg (2022, by Luke Stratton of Limithron) and Cy_Borg (2022, by Christian Sahlén and Johan Nohr, published by Free League) inherit the whole toolkit: characters made in minutes, a d20 rolled against a difficulty number, players making every roll while enemies never roll to attack, and books stuffed with random tables that do half the preparation for you. Neither is an expansion. You do not need Mörk Borg on your shelf to play either one, though the family resemblance runs deep, down to the shared love of heavy music we wrote about in where doom metal meets the table. And if your real question is whether the grim medieval original might be your game, start with our comparison of Shadowdark, Mörk Borg and Old School Essentials first.

Where they really differ

Setting. Pirate Borg takes place in the Dark Caribbean, a cursed mirror of the golden age of piracy. A catastrophe called the Scourge raised the dead, the old world has fallen silent, and ships now trade in ash, the addictive residue of burned undead. Cy_Borg takes place in Cy, a megacity in the year 20X3 where corporations own everything, debt is a birthright, and nearly everyone is implanted, infected or infested with something. One game smells of tar, rum and gunpowder. The other smells of ozone and burning plastic.

The signature rules. Pirate Borg's pride is the sea. It has rules-light naval combat and eighteen ready-made ship stat blocks, so a chase, a broadside and a boarding action fit into a single evening without a wargame on the side. Add Devil's Luck, a small pool of luck points you spend to reroll a die, shrug off damage or cancel a fumble - very pirate, and very necessary. Cy_Borg's toys are apps, cybertech and Nano: hacker programs that can bite back with a virus when a roll fails, implants that may seize control of your body in a burst of Cy-Rage, and parasitic nanomachines that grant strange powers until a botched roll leaves you permanently infested. In both games your best tools can betray you. Pirate Borg hides that betrayal in the weather and the dead. Cy_Borg wires it directly into your character sheet.

Campaign shape. Pirate Borg is a sandbox. The book ships with a folding map of the Dark Caribbean, more than ninety tables for jobs, rumours, derelict ships and uncharted islands, and a complete sandbox adventure, The Curse of Skeleton Point. A campaign looks like a voyage: take a job, sail, watch it go wrong, bury what is left of the loot, repeat. Cy_Borg is mission-driven. Every character rolls a debt to someone powerful at creation, and a mission generator supplies the client, the job, the location and the complication. A campaign looks like a downward spiral: jobs to pay debts, debts that grow faster than the pay.

The flavour of chaos. Both games are deadly, but they laugh differently. Pirate Borg's chaos is adventurous: grim jokes, kraken sightings, terrible decisions made on too much rum. You grin, then the tide turns. Cy_Borg's chaos is furious: a satire of capitalism with glitching typography and zero sentimentality. Its sharpest touch is that dying costs money - drop below zero hit points and your punk is gone for good unless someone pays for emergency care. In Cy even death sends an invoice.

What it feels like at the table

A Pirate Borg session: your crew is becalmed within sight of a derelict brig, rolled up from a table two minutes ago. The brute rows over first and finds the deck crewed by things that used to be sailors. The zealot starts praying, the swashbuckler starts swinging, and the sorcerer opens a book that should have stayed shut. Someone spends their last point of Devil's Luck to turn a killing blow into a scar and a story. You limp back with a chest of cursed silver and a new heading on the map. It feels like a campfire tale told by people who know they are next.

A Cy_Borg session: the job was simple, in the way that jobs in Cy are always simple. Get into the lab, copy the data, get out. Then the hacker's app fails and wakes the ceiling turret, the gearhead's cybernetic arm decides it has its own opinion, and the nanomancer's powers fumble into something that will never wash off. You escape through neon rain with half the reward and twice the debt, and the whole table is laughing in disbelief. It feels like a two-minute hardcore track: over fast, ears ringing, play it again.

What you actually need to buy

For Pirate Borg, the Pirate Borg Core Rulebook (39.95 euros) is genuinely complete: six classes plus two optional ones, naval rules, a bestiary, the sandbox adventure and the folding map. If you are teaching a new group, the Pirate Borg Starter Set is a boxed alternative with a condensed player's guidebook, an exclusive adventure, dice, poster maps and laminated character sheets. For Cy_Borg, the Cy_Borg Core Rulebook (49.95 euros) is everything: rules, classes, the city of Cy and enough generators to run it for years. Both games use a standard set of polyhedral dice you probably already own. And Mörk Borg itself (29.95 euros) is strictly optional: buy it because you want it, not because either game requires it.

Choose Pirate Borg if ... / Choose Cy_Borg if ...

Choose Pirate Borg if you want a campaign with a map, a ship and a heading, not just a chain of one-shots. Choose it if your table likes horror with room for jokes, because undead piracy is grim and funny in the same breath. Choose it if you have always wanted naval battles but never wanted the homework, since two pages of rules carry an entire sea fight. And choose it if you play with newcomers: the starter set turns the first session into an unbox-and-play evening.

Choose Cy_Borg if you want sessions that hit hard and end fast, perfect for weeknights and short attention spans. Choose it if your table enjoys playing magnificent losers, because the debt rules make sure nobody ever comes out ahead. Choose it if technology that betrays its owner sounds like fun rather than frustration. And choose it if your group's mood is more anger than adventure: no game on our shelves channels fury this well. If you read both descriptions and keep drifting toward the bleak medieval original instead, that is your answer too - Mörk Borg is the third door, and we sell it.

Where to start at Netherbook

Start with the world that pulls at you: the Pirate Borg Core Rulebook or the Cy_Borg Core Rulebook, or the Pirate Borg Starter Set if you would rather open a box and play. Our Pirate Borg starter guide and Cy_Borg starter guide walk you through your first session step by step. And if this whole corner of the hobby speaks to you, browse the Mörk Borg collection, the wider OSR collection, and the Metal & Doom collection, where both of these beautiful, doomed books feel right at home.