Sliding block puzzles suck. Jeff and Dan voiced that opinion in the Tomorrow Children QL and after reading over gkhan's Foolproof Guide to Solving Them, I agreed. That got me thinking about what puzzles in games I did like, and in the course of considering it, my thoughts eventually drifted to my 3rd favorite MMO of all time: Puzzle Pirates.

My best summary of the game's premise is a family-friendly version of EVE Online where your skill is determined by how well you can solve a variety of puzzles. Set on a pirate-inhabited chain of islands, the game boasts PvE raids, PvP blockades, player-controlled islands and economies, and 22 different types of puzzles that determine your skill at everything from rearming cannons to brewing ale. It is one of the last MMOs released before the World of Warcraft entered the scene and changed the landscape forever; it came out just a half-year after EVE Online did, and it shares EVE's vision of an MMO as a player-controlled gameworld rather than a giant amusement park. It is quickly approaching 13 years of age, and it still has a respectable population of 500 players online during American evening hours; not enough to encourage active developer support, but still enough to keep the servers running.

Exactly when I played it has faded into the mists of my personal history; I vaguely recall playing it as an alternative to World of Warcraft after my raiding guild broke up and I burnt out on the Burning Crusade. I subscribed to Puzzle Pirates for about 3 months and played in a small-but-active crew called the Cookie Pirates. I participated in a few PvP blockades and even won a sloop painted in the colors of the American flag from a 4th-of-July raffle. While I didn't play it for years like I did WoW, I still have fond memories of my time with the game and just how unique it was; in comparison, I view most of my time spent playing WoW and EVE Online as ultimately wasted. Why?

Replacing level/equipment-based progression with puzzling skill stuck out the most to me. This game completely abandoned standard RPG level-progression and minimized the effects of equipment to just 3 fighting puzzles. There was nothing stopping a complete novice from becoming one of the best gunners in the archipelago except for skill and practice. It was a pure form of the capitalist dream of going from rags to riches solely through hard work and perseverance.

It didn't hurt the puzzles were varied and interesting enough to keep your attention for the 15-45 minutes most pillaging runs took. The full gamut of them resembles a grab bag from every puzzle game in gaming history: Bilging is a Match-3 puzzler, Sailing uses Dr. Mario mechanics, Swordfighting resembles Puyo Puyo, Brawling imitates Bust-a-Move, and so forth. Every ship required different stations to be manned to stay in tiptop shape, which meant on most trips you could play anywhere from 3-8 different types of puzzles.

All of these puzzles were tied into a higher metagame of "how well is the ship doing?" Each crewmate's puzzling contribution either repaired damage to the ship, kept it going at full speed and turning quickly, or reloaded cannons to fire at opponents. The entire enterprise was led by the ship captain, who directly controlled the ship and ordered crewmates to change stations depending on what he needed most at the time. The ship captain had his own unique puzzle: a turn-based grid wargame where you tried to predict your enemy's movements and unload a couple broadsides into their hull before boarding their ship. Once the boarding commenced, the two crews duked it out in what can best be described as Puyo Puyo or Bust-a-Move Vs mode applied to mass combat. Players ganged up on the biggest threats, playing aggressively when no one was targeting them and stalling for time when the enemy turned their eye towards them. This most basic of activities, the pillaging run, required a group to succeed and encouraged interacting with other players.

Puzzle Pirates encouraged these interactions at every turn. When you were out pillaging, you were cooperating with crewmates against enemy crews. When you were relaxing at the Inn, you were gambling with crewmates (or anyone who happened to pass by) on games of skill. The solo crafting puzzles were tied into player shop owners paying for labor, and thus were tied into the player economy as a whole. Nearly all of the rewards were either cosmetic items or furniture for your house, with the implication you would be showing them off to your mates in-game. Not even EVE Online encouraged this much interaction in every aspect of the game; Puzzle Pirates put importance on the Massively Multiplayer part of MMOs.

But would that still hold up 12 years after its release, when the server population had dwindled to a few hundred people at any given time?

My Return

I logged into my old account and looked at my now-ragged character. I made him before the free-to-play oceans (servers) were opened, back when you had to subscribe to buy any items above the basic outfit. As much as I would like to play him and pilot my Star-Spangled Sloop into hostile waters again, the subscription ocean only had about 50 players online at any given time; I would need to recruit over 10% of the server pop just to fully crew my vessel. I sighed and instead turned my eye towards the F2P oceans, which had 350 players online. While I couldn't transfer my pirate or his ship over, I could make a new character and soon do just as well as I did in the old days.

Within minutes of logging in on my new character, I stumbled upon two dozen players idly waiting at the docks for jobs. A few showed signs of life, occasionally moving or grouping with nearby players for private conversations. I checked the Notice Board: there were 3 pillaging runs going on. I chose one, and within minutes I was matching Sailing patterns and Swordfighting just like old times. My puzzle skills were quite rusty, but I still managed to hold my own and came away from the job with enough booty to buy a new sword and some more clothes.

While the player economy runs entirely on Pieces of Eight, nearly every item delivered has a Doubloon surcharge as well. Doubloons are the real-money currency of Puzzle Pirates, although it lets players trade them for in-game Pieces of Eight, similar to EVE's PLEX and WoW's sellable monthly subscriptions. I paid for $10 worth of Doubloons via Paypal, getting 42 Doubloons in the process- more than enough to buy my sword, clothes, and a 30-Day Labor Badge that let me make money crafting items for a month.

After choosing an archipelago to live on and hitching a ride there (the game provides instant warping between islands in the same archipelago, but to travel to a new archipelago you have take the long route by ship), I checked into the various shops to see if they had anything for me to work on. I was disappointed to see none of the shops on my island had orders waiting to be made.

I took the ferry to one of the larger islands in the archipelago. It was crammed with dozens upon dozens of shops, but only a few of them still had anything left to sell or were taking orders. The rest had the air of a commercial ghost town filled with abandoned shops which remained "open" as long as coffers had enough money to pay the rent. The few shops that were open filled my needs well; I bought everything I was looking for and even put in some labor at one of them for a bit of extra coin.

The next day, I logged back into the game to see a Job Posting for a Flotilla. I joined in, not quite knowing what I was getting myself into. What followed was a 2-hour long multi-ship battle between one of the larger active guilds and a Brigand King, Puzzle Pirates' equivalent of a raid. Neophytes like myself rubbed shoulders with players who had been active in the game for 5 years straight, all contributing to helping our ship take out brigand after brigand. While that aspect of contributing to an endgame raid after just 2 days of playing was nice, this was where Puzzle Pirates's gameplay model broke down for me: 2 hours of playing the same 5 puzzles over and over again just got boring, and by the time we were finished I had my fill of Puzzle Pirates for the day. However, I had also earned 20k pieces o' eight from the flotilla, which was over 5x my haul for my first day back. I could have bought another sloop with that money, perhaps painted it to look just like my Star-Spangled Sloop on the subscription ocean, but instead I used it to buy actual furniture for my personal shack instead of the straw-riddled cot I started with. I don't know yet if I'm invested enough in this game again to start piloting a ship on an ocean of just a few hundred pirates, but even a decade after I first played it, I'm glad to see there's still something appealing about this game.

Three Rings Design, the creators of Puzzle Pirates, is now a subsidiary of Sega, while Puzzle Pirates is now owned by Gray Havens, a company dedicated to keeping Puzzle Pirates (and other previous Three Rings games) operational as long as they can. I have to wonder, do they have any plans to make a sequel to their first (and flagship) product? The puzzle-based gameplay seems like a perfect fit for today's phones, and it would be nice to start anew on a fresh ocean, alongside thousands of people discovering it for the first time. Or is this game destined to slowly sink below the waves of history, host to a dwindling population smaller than a rural village? I don't know yet.

I certainly don't regret my time with the game, though. If you have any interest in multiplayer puzzling, or just seeing one of the stranger MMO ideas developed before WoW crushed the competition, I would suggest checking Puzzle Pirates out. It's still available at this site and on Steam for free.