Puzzle Pirates starts with the creation of a swarthy avatar, with several different hair sets and skin tones. All pirates start off with the same basic outfit, but newcomers receive a special activation code via email that produces a free gift -- in my "booty" menu was a brand new wrap skirt, appropriately distressed for pirate chic. I imagine that male characters receive a more gender-appropriate gift!

I started out on a sailing ship, where an NPC informed me I'd start out on bilge duty. All of the tasks related to seafaring in the Puzzle Pirates world are cultivated via puzzle games, and there's a different game for each task. The bilge puzzle was a horizontal gem-swapper -- unlike Bejeweled, though, it lets you switch any two gems, even if they don't match the ones adjacent, in order to slide certain pieces around to set up great moves.

Puzzle Pirates' games are surprisingly fantastic -- brightly colored, smooth interfaces and an actual challenge. Stimulating without being too difficult, they do, however, advance in complexity as your character gains statistics in that particular area. I bilged the ship while a small navigational map showed me where around the islands and surrounding seas I was sailing, and whenever the ship came to rest, a "Duty Report" popped up that let me know how I was doing at my job relative to the other characters (all NPCs, for the tutorial portion) were doing. By the end of my bilging tour I was "Incredible".

You receive pay in Pieces of Eight for the work that you do, coins that can be used to wager and trade with other characters. The purchase of actual in-game goods, however, usually requires doubloons, which can be purchased with cash or with Pieces of Eight. The PoEs have no actual cash value, and neither can doubloons be changed back for real money.

After my tutorial, the NPC advised me to check the notice board when I arrived back on land. In my very first tropical shantytown, there were fellow pirates everywhere, most of them toting fancy clothing and exotic pets -- one had a tiger, and another a black sheep. As I was a newbie, my Mission Board was loaded up with tasks relative to orienting myself; for my next mission, I decided to check out my house.

I had a bedroll and an empty crate inside my barren shack, which I could place wherever I liked in the room, but nothing other than that. My dingy little accommodations were a sobering reminder of my poor status in the Pirate Community. As if things couldn't get any worse, I was informed I had a rat in the house -- but in a happy surprise, this was my very own first pet to walk and name. I called him Rattsly, and he followed me everywhere.

I set out around the island looking for work to improve my situation. The economy of Puzzle Pirates is almost entirely user-created, with individual users able to start their own stores and hire their own employees. I thought I might get an upstanding job, but it requires a Work Badge, which costs doubloons. Looks like it's the pirate's life for me!

I returned to the Mission Board to see what jobs were available. I completed training missions and learned to swordfight from a pun-cracking NPC on another ship, and enjoyed manning the sails too, through a game that loosely resembles Tetris, only with color matching and without funky shapes. The funky shapes played into the Carpentry game, though -- sailing ships are in perpetual need of repair, but one of the jobs available lets you patch up holes in the deck with odd-shaped pieces of wood that you can flip and rotate in order to make them fit together. It's not to be advised for the spatially challenged, however, because trying to slap boards willy-nilly over the gaping holes results in a poor score (don't ask me how I know this).

The hard labor required to earn myself a serviceable amount of PoE didn't feel as grueling as the task names make it sound, though. The games are captivatingly fun, even addictive, and I found myself playing even after I'd satisfied the requirements of a particular job. During one tutorial, an NPC, fed up, had to insistently order me off of her ship when I tried to keep playing after the lesson was over.

Finally, I'd gotten my sea legs, and was back on land with 200 PoE. Fixing on a shopping spree, I decided to see what products I could have custom-made. A fancy wig might be nice, I thought -- until I saw its 94,000 PoE price tag! It definitely makes more sense to get customizables and goods with cash rather than hours of pirate sweat and tears on the high seas. So maybe I didn't have enough for a landowner's fancy feathered cap, but I did have enough to gamble with.

The taverns are the hub of Puzzle Pirates' multiplayer gaming -- you can carouse, brawl or play parlor games against other pirates, who will open a table in a game with the wager amount they're looking for and the ability level they'd like to compete against. The pros in the tavern were having two-on-two swordfighting brawls for thousands of PoEs; I couldn't find a table who'd take on a Neophyte (that's my rank) like me. So I opened my own, cautiously putting up 50 of my hard-earned PoE on a one-on-one swordfight with another rank amateur. Within seconds, another player took the challenge, and we began to play a fast-paced color-arranging game. Which I promptly lost handily, along with my 50 PoE. I didn't fare much better in two-on-two, and eventually, I slouched barefoot and dejected out of the tavern.

A fellow pirate stood on the stoop of a wondrous house; I immediately sidled up to converse and ask how he came by it. "Lol," he replied, "just looking. I'm pretty new myself." I wasn't alone, and added this fellow landlubber to my buddy list.

The governor's mansion was beautiful -- the high-value land and homes in the Puzzle Pirates world aren't owned by bossy NPCs or arbitrary AI rules. They're users, who worked their way up and bought the places. Inside, well-to-do pirates hung around with their fancy pets and frou-frou outfits. I received a welcome from the governor, and browsed around the fancy digs. A pirate's portrait was on the wall; when I examined it, I found it was a real player's pirate, painted with her pet alongside a fancy background with a list of all of her rankings and achievements on the back, along with the date she'd had the portrait commissioned.

I noticed that while her swordfighting skills may be "Legendary," at the card game of Hearts, she was a Neophyte like me. And, I reflected, she'd once been just like me -- a washed-up nobody without a doubloon to her name. The high seas spirit of the Puzzle Pirates world put the fire of adventure into my veins -- if she could work her way up, perhaps I'd be a noblewoman too, someday. And with all of the games left to play, working my way to estimable respect might be fun the entire time.