Puzzle Pirates

There are (at least) two kinds of puzzles out there. There's the kind you find in adventure games which often have a single solution, the kind where you struggle to figure out what the designer was thinking, or figure it out pretty quickly and move on. Then there's the stuff you find in PopCap games, Puzzle Quest, and the like, where skill is still a factor, but sometimes you can luck out, getting a bunch of combinations of fruit or jewels or skulls without really meaning to. One kind makes you feel dumber than you might be, the other makes you feel smarter than you are :)
 
After playing Gemini Rue, which wasn't terribly hard but still took some experimenting, I've been playing on the other side of the puzzle coin, specifically Puzzle Pirates. In PP you play a pirate who accumulates money (pieces of eight), outfitting yourself with clothes and gear, getting into brawls and swordfights, sailing aboard a pirate vessel, gambling, foraging for trinkets, and working as an artisan in shops. The trick is that all of these actions are performed through puzzles, each requiring slightly different skills. Carpentry is a bit like Tetris, where you have to fit five squares worth of panels onto holes in the sides of your ship. The better you do, the quicker it gets repaired from cannon blasts and general wear and tear. The bilge of your craft slowly fills up, and fills up quicker when you take damage, and that's reduced by a bejeweled-style matching game. 
 
Creating ship parts for shipbuilders involves shifting blocks to fit certain patterns, then matching those patterns in succession. Forging weapons and cannonballs has you hopping around a board represented by hot steel stamps on the background of a sword; whenever you land your smithy hammer on a symbol you have to move the amount of squares or the directions it specifies, and you try to make combinations of symbols while not falling into empty spaces.
 
This may sound weird, but it feels integrated. Along with all of these piratey trappings you're encouraged to talk pirate talk, join crews, raid NPC and player ships for loot, build a mansion for yourself, and even become the mayor of a town and build businesses. The economy is a living economy, so you'll have the ebb and flow of supply, labor, blockades, and trading. It's really quite intricate, but all that's running underneath. You can just as easily hop in and puzzle away if you want.
 
It's one of the first major games I remember introducing micropayments. On some servers it's subscription-based, on others you get items by purchasing them with the standard currency and a secondary currency called doubloons. These doubloons can be earned without paying a real cent through the doubloon market, but as time goes by the prices continue to naturally inflate as people who are selling up their asking price and the people who are buying are forced to meet that price to get what they want. That's where the incentive to buy doubloons with real money comes in. Still, if you want you never have to buy one. It just takes a while to get some of the game's perks that way. Pretty much all that's required to invest is time, or you can play on a subscriber server, which gives you free reign for the basics but cordons off some areas and functions as subscriber-only.
 
The game has flaws, of course. Some of the puzzles that a player may not like to play are still necessary to run a ship, so if you find yourself serving on a vessel that needs, say, sailing as a skill and you hate sailing, you have to stick with it to earn your pay. Working together with a good crew is a blast, but you can get petty or lazy people who don't contribute very well, or captains who don't know how to run a ship right. There's also a bit of technical proficiency required for some of the higher ranks, and if you get a truly incompetent captain you may find yourself wanting to opt out of your current crew altogether and start afresh with another group. 
 
As with any MMO, a lot depends on the group you find. I managed this time to find a crew that seemed decent, although under-populated.  If a group is weak and not terribly good at recruiting, you may not see action on a fully-crewed ship, which can be a drag. It pays to research groups ahead of time before applying, jobbing as a mercenary until you're sure you want to join.
 
There's also an issue with the items you earn; some of which are hard to come by without investing a lot of time or money. In brawls and swordfights, you actually get an edge over other players. In more laid-back games like you find on Facebook, the competition is often indirect; you may not have everything that other guy has, but if you don't worry so much about competition it's not going to affect your own performance. In Puzzle Pirates' personal combat you're more likely to get swamped if you don't have the equipment. I've managed to defeat better-armed players before, but this may lead to frustration if you expect to come out on top through skill alone in PvP combat. If you play games like this with loot in mind, three really isn't so much of that. It's more about getting experience in puzzles, and earning reputation and gold.
 
Sometimes that reputation can come too easily, if you luck out on a puzzle. Other times you may be hitting your head against a puzzle that's a bit cruel with its distribution of colored blocks, which is familiar to anyone who plays the more luck-based puzzle games out there.
 
It's been a while since I played last, and things don't feel quite as vibrant, although it also seems like a lot of the spammers and jerks I remember have sorta disappeared. The biggest jerk I met during a marathon session yesterday was someone who kept going all-in at the poker table, or someone who whined about not getting to run the cannons onboard. There's plenty to do solo, anyway, if humanity is bugging you. In general it was nice to revisit the game. It's one of the few MMOs I've yet found that fits my style, giving my tangible rewards immediately when I do a clever turn at a puzzle, rather than my feeling like some unthinking cog in a machine. So, I guess on the scale of puzzles I started this article with, it's definitely not as lightweight as other puzzle games out there, and it certainly has its share of variety.
 
If anyone's played this, or tries it out, I'm curious what you think of it.