As an all-powerful Pirate King, players must manage a seventeenth century band of buccaneers in Tropico 2: Pirate Cove. To attract the most frightening of history's sea-faring bad boys, Pirate Kings must keep their charges brave and well-supplied between voyages. The island's " yo-ho-ho's" must stay at a feverish pitch in order to keep the King and his buccaneers satisfied with drinking, wenching, gambling, feasting, and the best in pirate accommodations.

Success in Tropico 2: Pirate Cove depends on careful management of the pirate population. As dead men earn no plunder, the King must keep his pirates well equipped for potentially lethal missions. Sea dogs require muskets, cutlasses, cannons, and the skills to use them when they venture forth to plunder the Spanish Main.

Tropico 2 features several major innovations to the original Tropico game. The traditional economic model is reversed: the player maintains their wealth not by production of materials, but by plundering merchants on the high seas and bringing the victims back to the island as captive workers. In addition, the pirate characters show a great deal of individual personality, so that the player becomes truly vested in the characters' well-being. The island is also zoned so that richer pirates may sequester themselves in their own booty-filled mansions, which automatically upgrade as their standards of living improve.