Puzzle Pirates from Three Rings Design is an online multi-player role playing game in which the community of players, the pirates, go about the serious business of pirating – pillaging for booty on the high seas.
Puzzle Pirates is divided into a number of different oceans where players can play either by subscribing or for free with the option of paying for extras as they go. Each ocean is a self-contained community with a market economy. Pirates with good sea legs can earn money by teaming with other pirates and sailing from island to island on the high seas pillaging booty from enemy vessels. While on land, pirates can challenge each other to a fight with a friendly wager, enter tournaments or relax by playing card and other parlour games. The more entrepreneurial pirates can run stalls trading commodities or employing other pirates and selling their products to pirates with a taste for the finer things in life.
When joining a Puzzle Pirate ocean for the first time, (Puzzle Pirates Gold)players get to customise their pirate character by choosing their name, gender, skin colour and their hair colour and style. New players are guided through the games and the intricacies of the pirate community. The game keeps track of each pirate’s experience and ability for each of the puzzles and provides increasing levels of difficulty based on performance.
Experienced pirates can join a crew of like-minded pirates and work towards promotion through the officer ranks to be able to buy a ship and run their own pillaging expeditions. The political relationships between pirate crews can be complex as alliances are made and broken, wars declared and islands blockaded.
The community aspect of Puzzle Pirates is enhanced by the availability of chatting to other pirates and the ability to add pirates as hearties (friends) for whom you can see their online status. Pirates frequently use pirate-speak to communicate and potentially offensive words are automatically converted into pirate-speak. The larger pirate crews have online forum websites where they discuss pirate life outside of the game.
On board a ship, each pirate performs a specific task such as sailing, carpentry, bilging, loading the cannons or navigating nder the direction of the captain. Each of these tasks has a puzzle game associated with it and each player's performance affects the ships movement. From time to time the pirates will encounter another pirate ship and engage in a sea battle which results in a melee in the form of a crew versus crew swordfighting puzzle where the winning crew wins booty from the losers.
Pirates who work for stall owners perform their duties by playing puzzles for distilling rum, alchemistry or ship building. In the inns, pirates can play parlour games such as hearts, spades and poker against each other or enter tournaments for the swordfighting, rumble, drinking or treasure drop puzzles.
