Treasure Island Game: Four Ways to Play Stevenson's Pirate Classic

4 October 2026

If you are looking for a Treasure Island game, there are four real ways to play one today. There is Matagot’s Treasure Island, a board game where one player is Long John Silver and everyone else draws on a map to find his gold. There are two old video games built on the novel, the 1984 Jim Hawkins adventure for home computers and the 1996 Muppet Treasure Island CD-ROM. Or you can step inside Robert Louis Stevenson’s book itself as your own character, with a narrator that has read it and answers whatever you type. Which one fits depends on whether you want a family night around a table, a dose of nostalgia, or a berth on the Hispaniola with Silver smiling at you across the galley.

This guide goes through all four, says who each one suits, and ends with how to try the last one tonight without paying anything.

One name to set aside first. If you searched for a Treasure Island game and found a single-player puzzle about an ancient temple, that is SmartGames’ Treasure Island: a logic puzzle with 80 challenges for ages 8 to adult. It is a good puzzle. It has nothing to do with the novel, so it is not covered below.

What people want from a Treasure Island game

The novel is short and moves fast, and it holds three very different evenings:

• The treasure hunt. A map with an X on it, a skeleton pointing the way, and a hole in the ground that turns out to be empty when the pirates reach it.
• The pirates. Blind Pew tapping down the road, the black spot pressed into a palm, and Long John Silver, the most likeable villain in English fiction, who is never quite on anyone’s side but his own.
• The voyage. Jim in the apple barrel overhearing the mutiny, the stockade on the island, Ben Gunn in his cave, and the night Jim cuts the Hispaniola loose on his own.

The table shows where each option lands.

The four options side by side

The claims below about Matagot’s game are as of October 2026, read from a retailer listing for it. The claims about the two video games come from their public release records. The claims about the novel are read from its Project Gutenberg edition.

Treasure Island by Matagot, the board game

Matagot’s Treasure Island is a family board game designed by Marc Paquien and illustrated by Vincent Dutrait. The retailer listing we read in October 2026 sums up the whole idea in one line:

“Race to find Long John Silver’s buried gold by drawing his clues on a treasure map!”

The set-up borrows the novel’s best trick. One player is Long John Silver, who secretly marks where his treasure is buried and then sits in prison giving the others clues, some true and some not. Everyone else is a pirate searching the island, and they draw their moves and search areas straight onto a dry erase board with a compass and templates. When Silver escapes, the race is on.

Pick it if you want a game night for a family or a group, you like bluffing and deduction, and you enjoy the moment somebody realises Silver has been lying to them all along.

It is weaker for anyone who wants the novel’s story. The theme is a light coat over a clever hunt: there is no Jim, no Hispaniola and no mutiny, only the map, the lies and the gold.

Treasure Island (1984), the home computer game

Treasure Island was a 1984 game from the British publisher Mr. Micro for the ZX Spectrum and the Commodore 64, with versions for the Commodore 16 and Plus/4 as well. Greg Duddle programmed it and David Whittaker wrote the music.

You play Jim Hawkins, moving across the island one flip-screen at a time with limited supplies, while pirates throw cutlasses at you as soon as you come into range. Pick up a cutlass yourself and you can fight back, all the way to a final showdown with Silver.

Pick it if you collect 8-bit games, you grew up on a Spectrum or a C64, or you are curious how a 1980s programmer squeezed a novel into a few dozen screens. Today that means an original cassette and machine, or an emulator.

It is weaker for anyone who wants story. It is an action game in which the plot of the book is mostly the backdrop.

Muppet Treasure Island, the 1996 CD-ROM

Muppet Treasure Island is a point-and-click CD-ROM game that Activision made for Windows and Mac OS in 1996, based on the Muppet film of the same year. You play Hawkins, setting out from the Admiral Benbow Inn for the island, with Gonzo, Rizzo and a new character, Stevenson the Parrot, along to guide you. The Muppets appear as video clips over animated backgrounds.

Pick it if the Muppet film is your Treasure Island, you have young children who would enjoy it, or you love 1990s CD-ROM games and have an old machine or an emulator that runs them.

It is weaker for anyone who wants the book. It follows the film, jokes included, and getting a 1996 CD-ROM to run on a modern computer takes some work.

Playing inside Treasure Island as your own character

The fourth way skips the board, the cassette and the CD and starts from the source. Treasure Island is public domain in the USA, and Project Gutenberg carries the complete novel as plain text and EPUB.

Imagine reading it from the inside. You are a deckhand on the Hispaniola who has noticed how many of the new crew Silver seems to know already, and you have to decide who to tell. You are a regular at the Admiral Benbow on the night the blind man comes tapping up the road. You are one of the mutineers in the stockade, and you are starting to suspect your captain has made his own deal. The people of the book are there, the places are where Stevenson put them, and Silver will be charming to you right up until he is not.

This is what LLM RPG does. You upload a book as a .txt or .epub file, and it builds an atlas of that book’s world (characters, factions, places, items and events) before your first scene. Then you play as a character you create, typing what you do, while a game master narrates each turn grounded in that atlas. Your run remembers what you have done across turns and reloads, so the share of the treasure you promised a pirate is still owed when you reach the island.

Treasure Island is a short novel, which helps twice over. The world it builds is tight and easy to hold in your head, and turning it into a world costs far less than a long novel does.

If you would rather start with no download at all, there is a ready-made pirate world, a pirate text RPG, where you have just taken a ship from a captain who deserved it and the crew have not decided whether that makes you one of them. The treasure you are all chasing has drowned everyone who ever found it. It is an original world rather than Stevenson’s, but mutiny, a shifting crew and a cursed hoard are close cousins of the Hispaniola’s voyage, and it is a quick test of whether typed play suits you.

Pick it if what you want is to be inside the novel as yourself, making the choices Jim never had to, and you would rather start typing tonight than gather four players or hunt down an old computer.

It is weaker for players who want a table full of friends or real-time action. It is a written story, read and typed, and it plays alone.

For more books played the same way, see the guides to a Robin Hood game, a Sherlock Holmes game and a Dracula game. For the wider field, see solo role playing games and text-based RPG games.

What it takes to start each one

With LLM RPG you can play a ready-made world for five turns with no account at all, and signing up adds 50 free credits. Turning a book into a world costs credits, and you are shown the exact price before anything is spent. The current plans and credit packs are on the pricing page.

How to start a Treasure Island game tonight

If playing inside the novel sounds like your kind of game, this is the whole path from nothing to your first scene.

1. Try it with no account. Open the pirate text RPG and play five turns. A few minutes tells you whether typing your own actions suits you.
2. Sign up with your email if it does. You get a one-time code, no password.
3. Download the novel. Get Treasure Island from Project Gutenberg as a .txt or .epub file.
4. Upload it. The narrator reads it and builds the world before you play, and you are shown what the reading costs before anything is spent.
5. Make your character. A ship’s boy who signed on for the adventure, a squire’s servant who does not trust the cook, an old hand who sailed with Flint and knows exactly what is buried on that island.
6. Type what you do. Then see how the crew answers.

When one of the other three is the better choice

Pick by the evening you want. A family table and a race for the gold: Matagot’s Treasure Island, where the best part of the novel, a charming liar who knows where the treasure is, becomes one player’s whole job. Nostalgia with a joystick: the 1984 game, if you have the machine or an emulator. The Muppets, singing: Muppet Treasure Island on an old computer, for a family that loves the film.

Play inside the novel when the thing you want is the story itself: to stand on the deck as the island rises out of the morning fog, decide whether you believe Long John Silver, and find out what you would have done with Flint’s gold.