Assassin's Creed IV Black Flag: Nassau and the Observatory

The story opens in Havana in 1715, and Edward Kenway walks into its conspiracy by accident: he kills the Assassin Duncan Walpole, takes his clothes and his name, and inherits his seat at a meeting of Templars. There he meets Woodes Rogers and the Templar Grand Master, Laureano Torres, who really was governor of Cuba from 1713 to 1716. Unmasked, Edward is put aboard a treasure fleet; a storm lets him away with the quartermaster Adéwalé, and he keeps the ship, names her the Jackdaw and sails for Nassau. The fortress guarding this harbour is the Morro, and Old Havana has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1982.

Location precision: The game names no building in Havana; the pin marks the Morro fortress at the entrance to the harbour Edward sails into.

Visitor guidance: The Morro stands at the mouth of Havana harbour, inside the Old Havana World Heritage Site inscribed in 1982.

Edward reaches a pirate republic already in trouble. Blackbeard and Benjamin Hornigold have taken Nassau and declared it free, but poor government, no economy and disease are eating it alive; the Governor of Bermuda reckoned out more than 1,000 pirates here against about a hundred inhabitants. The founders Edward meets are Hornigold, Blackbeard and James Kidd — Mary Read in disguise — who build the brotherhood out of this harbour. On the hill above it stands the British fort, a short walk west of downtown: Fort Charlotte, built in the British colonial era.

Location precision: Black Flag rebuilds Nassau from scratch as a pirate town; the pin marks the British fort above the harbour.

Visitor guidance: Fort Charlotte sits uphill from the harbour, a short walk west of downtown Nassau and the cruise terminal.

James Kidd — the name Edward knows Mary Read by — invites him to Tulum, where he finds the Assassins' main camp and learns that Kidd is one of them. The Brotherhood's chief Ah Tabai reproaches him for having sold Torres maps of their camps, then makes him help repel an attack by the slaver Laurens Prins. Mary, too, ends up working here. The camp is invented, but the ground under it is not: the real Tulum is a pre-Columbian Maya walled city and major port for Coba, standing on 12-metre cliffs above the Caribbean, one of the best-preserved coastal Maya sites anywhere.

Location precision: The Assassins' camp exists only in the game; the pin marks the Maya ruins the game sets it among.

Visitor guidance: The ruins stand on 12-metre cliffs on the Caribbean coast of Quintana Roo, near the town of Tulum.

In Kingston Edward goes after the Sage to the house of a slaver named Laurens Prins. That night, breaking into it, the man he has known as James Kidd tells him the truth: he is a woman, Mary Read, who has lived as a man since her mother dressed her in her dead brother's clothes. She and Anne Bonny were among the few women of the Golden Age of Piracy. The city is newer than most of the game's settings: Kingston was founded on 22 July 1692 to house the survivors of the Port Royal earthquake, on a harbour sheltered by the Palisadoes sand spit.

Location precision: The game never names Prins's house; the pin marks downtown Kingston, where the game puts it.

Visitor guidance: Downtown Kingston lies behind the harbour; the Palisadoes spit carries the road out to Port Royal.

Woodes Rogers arrives with Commodore Chamberlaine and a fleet, and announces the King's Pardon. Hornigold accepts; Edward and Charles Vane run, slipping the blockade by sending a fireship at the British ships — the real Rogers reached Nassau on 24 July 1718 and Vane escaped him in just that way. Later, a festival is broken up by British soldiers and Blackbeard is killed in the fighting; the real Edward Teach died on 22 November 1718, found at anchor off Ocracoke Island in North Carolina. Nassau's main port is still this waterfront, where the cruise ships come in.

Location precision: Black Flag rebuilds Nassau from scratch; the pin marks the main wharf on the harbour front, where the blockade lies.

Visitor guidance: Prince George Wharf is Nassau's main port, where cruise ships call.

The story's furthest reach is an island in the Gulf of Guinea, where the Sage is living as a pirate: Bartholomew Roberts, the most successful captain of the Golden Age by ships taken, dead in reality on 10 February 1722. Edward joins his crew and learns where the Observatory lies: a device that can monitor anyone anywhere in the world from a sample of their blood. Príncipe is no fantasy island: 142 square kilometres of eroded volcano off west Africa, with a Portuguese fortress raised at Santo António Bay in 1695. In 1919 its skies gave Eddington the eclipse photographs that confirmed relativity.

Location precision: The game uses the real island but invents its anchorage; the pin marks the island in the Gulf of Guinea.

Edward ends up in Port Royal's prison and escapes when the Assassin Mentor Ah Tabai breaks in to rescue Mary Read and Anne Bonny. Rackham and Stede Bonnet have already been hanged, Vane awaits execution, and Mary dies from complications after giving birth. Port Royal was once the largest and richest city in the Caribbean, notorious as "the wickedest city on Earth", until an earthquake and tsunami destroyed it on 7 June 1692. Later it became the place where pirates were executed: Charles Vane and John Rackham were both hanged at Gallows Point.

Location precision: The game names only a prison; the pin marks Gallows Point, the execution ground at the end of the Palisadoes.

Visitor guidance: Port Royal is a small town at the end of the Palisadoes spit; part of the 17th-century town lies underwater in the harbour.

Black Flag ends quietly. Edward hangs up his sword, moves to London, and years later goes with his daughter Jennifer and Haytham to The Beggar's Opera at the Royal Opera House. The theatre is real, in Covent Garden: John Rich commissioned the Beggar's Opera from John Gay in 1728 and put the profits into building it, and the façade, foyer and auditorium you walk into today are from 1858, the third theatre to stand on the site after fires in 1808 and 1856.

Visitor guidance: The Royal Opera House is in Covent Garden, central London; the façade, foyer and auditorium are the 1858 ones.