Here's an overview of Puzzle Pirates, the MMO-slash-puzzle game fromThree Rings Design.
Name: Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates
Company: Three Rings Design
Established: December 2003
How it Works: Java; it runs in a small client window, and the installation's brief. Navigation and gameplay is accomplished primarily via mouse, with simple keyboard controls for some games.
Overview: Puzzle Pirates puts users into the shoes of an adventurous pirate on the high seas. Pirates sail ships, collect booty, organize groups and perform seafaring tasks, and all of these elements -- carpentry, sailing, even pumping the bilge -- are accomplished via puzzle games. Users can chat, organize groups (called "Flags") craft products and sell goods on land.
Payment Method: Puzzle Pirates has an extensive free play mode, though there are subscription servers also that charge a monthly fee of either $9.95 per month or 42 doubloons, the currency which can be purchased for cash or traded for by other players in-game. The actual in-game currency, earned through the minigames, is Pieces of Eight, which have no cash value.
Key Features:
-Both solo and multiplayer puzzles
-Both consistent-market economy and player-contributed elements
-Users can gain rank by joining crews and even become area royalty
Puzzle Pirates: In-Depth Tour
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.
Puzzle Pirates: Conclusion
Puzzle Pirates is deceptively complex. The number of statistics and rankings that can be affected by playing the games is utterly voluminous, and it isn't immediately clear, aside from enabling you to play more complicated or challenging versions of the same game, what benefits this provides. One key element, though, is that the basic experience is fully available to everyone, doubloons or not, no matter how fully invested they wish-- or don't wish-- to get. With most of the job-games available from the mission board, Puzzle Pirates could be just a particularly elaborate content delivery network for fans of casual games.
And it wouldn't make such a bad one -- the games are quite good. Most of them are elaborations or twists on familiar puzzle-game formats like Snood, Bejeweled or Tetris, but they're all consistent with the oceanic, swashbuckling theme. The bilge game has attractive turquoise-patterned tiles, and the sailing game, which involves rotating and fitting together sets of interconnected pieces, looks like seashells and jewels. This is all bolstered by pleasing ambient sound effects -- the sound of the wind filling the sails when you score, or the rush of the ocean or burbling of water as your puzzle progress helps the team sail the ship.
It's a refreshing change from the clumsy over-simplicity of other puzzle games in worlds for young people; with a difficulty level that advances with your experience and a polished interface, they're all games that adults and kids could find equally engaging, rather than just being a slapdash conveyance to earn points or gold. Since the puzzles, logically enough, are the centerpiece of the Puzzle Pirates world, this makes good sense.
The rest of the interface is not so clean. Navigation in the world is a little jerky with the mouse clicking -- it'd be nice to have an alternate control set using the keyboard. You need to be standing within a certain radius of another character to converse with him or her, and if too many other characters are in that "circle" you won't be able to join in. There's no way to pan around an area while standing still, so you often can't see what's ahead in very expansive areas until you walk that way.
The play screen is a bit busy, too. Though everything's consolidated on one main screen, with the menus in one compartment with chat and notifications below them, the map above, and play in the main window, means you have to learn to juggle looking in more than one place at once. Sometimes chat bubbles take place beside the appropriate avatar in the play screen, and other times it appears in the chat window. You may have to respond to a notification in the chat window by clicking a button in the play window for one purpose, and then for another it'll be a button in the menu or a pop-up on the map screen. If, focused on the play window, you miss a notification, you might be stuck until you figure what it was you were asked to press and where (and what for).
The basics are very intuitive -- the games can be learned fairly easily by playing them, and most everything is point-and-click. While there is some tutorial given, it could be a little better integrated -- NPCs will give you loose explanations, but the details are not always clear. The first hour in the Puzzle Pirates world might feel a bit like shooting in the dark, although the learning curve can be quickly climbed merely through experimentation.
The only major peeve about the games themselves is the pop up "Duty Report" that appears every few rounds (or, leagues you sail) to let you know how you and the others on your team are performing with the ship's tasks. It can be challenging to be maneuvering a difficult piece into a tricky spot when all of a sudden you're interrupted by this game-obscuring screen on a fairly frequent basis, and you can't close it yourself. It's easy to have forgotten where in a move you were paused by the time the Duty Report closes, and since the games are so immersive and addictive, sometimes the Duty Report feels like an infuriating interference with your "fix."
All of the technical clumsiness seems insignificant, though, in light of how fully-realized the Puzzle Pirates world is. The pirate thematics are outright adorable in their detail, and site literature encourages users to talk "pirate-y" by inserting "Arr," into sentences and calling one another "matey."
The social hierarchy is a rather fascinating concept, as is the idea of forming teams to own a ship and send it to war. Complicated opportunities for long-term players are vast, and it seems to be very rewarding to invested users. YPPedia, Puzzle Pirates' official Wiki, is rich with content and provides a charming insight to what the game means to its players; a huge directory of fan-contributed character art shows how strongly users connect to their experiences in the world, and it's not surprising -- through the natural progression of entirely user-generated play, some pretty exciting and dramatic character stories can take place, since all the right ingredients are there: rags to riches stories, adventure and danger on the high seas, and climbing the ranks of proficiency in a variety of crafts.
Since you're not penalized for selective involvement, users can tailor their Puzzle Pirates experience -- they can simply play games with others in a charming environment, or they can invest personally in the games' outcome, form friendships and pursue advancement. It's a tenderly-drawn and adventuresome environment that's solid where it counts.
Useful Links:
YPPedia (Puzzle Pirates' Wiki)
Puzzle Pirates Forums
Puzzle Pirates FAQ
Daniel James on Puzzle Pirates, Online Community Management, Cutlass Waving
