Aim for the Head

It seems odd t’ say that thar be a seedy underbelly t’ Puzzle Pirates, but I be jus’ nay ready t’ believe that so many swabbies be actively roleplayin’. This underbelly I speak o’ be greed.

When ye get on a ship t’ job an’ pillage, th’ expectation, I would think, be that ye would hit th’ high seas until either th’ rum runs ou’ or th’ hold be so full o’ booty that th’ water threatens t’ flood in through th’ port holes. However, ever’ time a ship sets sail wi’ me aboard, after we`ve attacked an’ beaten one vessel some o’ th’ other shipmates begin clammorin’ fer the’r share o’ th’ booty. Now, booty be nay normally split until we return t’ port, so ye end up wi’ half th’ boat demandin’ we return t’ port after one successful swashbuckle.

On the’r part, this be very short sighted. Fer one, if ye feel th’ need t’ leave, ye`ll still get a share o’ th’ loot when ‘t gets split later. Ye dasn’t be havin’ t’ be present. Th’ other, an’ more pertinant issue, be that when yer crew be sixty ruffians, an swabbie split o’ e’en a haul o’ 50,000 pieces o’ eight will only be about 500 pieces, maybe a wee more or perhaps a wee less.

Th’ irritatin’ thin’ be that these swabbies jus’ will nay shut up. Cryin’ like infants they`ll keep demandin’ we port an’ split th’ cash, swashbuckle after swashbuckle, an’ if ye know anythin’ about th’ way th’ puzzles work ye know what that means. If ye dasn’t, well, if ye be talkin’ then ye aren`t workin’. So, get back t’ work, ye barnacles!

I think so far one of my favorite things to do in Puzzle Pirates is to sit down to a good poker table. What is a good poker table? Well, for one, you don’t have people who are binary (Fold or All In). Next, good table chatter… Usually good chatter consists of just random chat about some subject, or even talk about poker, or in the case of Puzzle Pirate the chatter can be incharacter piratey stuff. Sometimes, however, the chatter is, well, let me just give an example:

Mrbert: So what is everyone’s favorite suited pocket hand?
Killerjoy: A pair of Aces.
Mrbert: Naturally.
Gogoboots: I like a pair of Queens because they are more likely to turn into three of a kind.
Picklehead: I prefer to bluff with a pair of twos.
Ishiro: Isn’t it kind of hard to have a suited pair?

See that guy at the end? That’s me. It took me another twenty minutes to explain why you couldn’t have a suited pair. I mean, it took a couple minutes just to explain what suited meant (same suit). Then a few people at the table were insisting that poker was played with a six deck shuffle. My attempts to point out that blackjack, not poker, is the game that uses a multideck shoe. (“A shoe? You are making this stuff up!”) Gogoboots agreed that only one deck was used, and that was why she preferred Queens, because a single deck has twelve Queens. It took another five minutes to understand that when she said “Queens” what she meant was “face cards”, you know, Jacks, Queens and Kings.

After a while, I gave up and decided that indeed ignorance is bliss, and messing with the ignorant is hilarious:

Mrbert: I love to get a flush.
Ishiro: This morning I had a double flusher.
Gogoboots: What’s that?
Mrbert: Its rare. It is when you get two flushes in a row.
Picklehead: No, its when you can make two flushes with the same hand.
Mrbert: Oh, I’m thinking of a b2b-flush.
Picklehead: Yeah.
Samson: Billions of Blue Blistering Barnacles!
Killerjoy: I had a triple flusher once. It was awesome.
Mrbert: I bet! The chances of that are like a zillion to one!
Ishiro: The worst though is when you get upper decked.
Picklehead: Yeah! I hate that!
Mrbert: Is that when everyone else is dealt a pocket pair but you?
Picklehead: No, it is when you get a good pair and then two or more people deal into royal straights.
Mrbert: Wow. That does sound awful.
Gogoboots: I did that once.
Gogoboots: Flippered into a royal straight.
Ishiro: You have to be careful or you’ll flipper into a tilt.
Gogoboots: What?
Mrbert: A tilt. When you miss your straight by one card, like 4,5,6,7,9.
Samson: Billions of Blue Blistering Barnacles!
Ishiro: I’m going to get a high score!
[everyone folds]
Ishiro: Roasters!
Gogoboots: Roasters?
Ishiro: Kenny Rogers.
Mrbert: Who is that?
Ishiro: He’s a gambler.
Mrbert: Didn’t he win the WSOP last year.
Killerjoy: He did. I saw it live on TV.
Picklehead: I played in the WSOP last year, made it to the semi-final round.
Samson: He really knows when to hold ‘em and when to fold ‘em.
You tell Samson: Bravo!

Yes, Samson, Bravo indeed.

The only thing worst than crappy chatter at a Puzzle Pirates poker table, are those “8s 8″ idiots. You see, in real life, when someone makes an extraordinary effort to save, say, five dollars, they might say something like “Hey, five bucks is five bucks, man.” This indicates that saving the five bucks was worth the effort. In Puzzle Pirates, you don’t have dollars, you have Pieces of Eight (PoE or poe), and comparatively they have little value. Buying anything worthwhile in the game literally costs thousands of PoE. In poker, when some idiot goes All In before the flop and the table folds their blinds and he earns a whopping 3 or 6 or 8 PoE, what he would like to say is, “Hey, eight pieces of eight is eight pieces of eight, man.” But as we all should be well aware, typing is a skill some people refuse to learn, and so saying that would be too much, so instead he says, “8s 8.” Now, if this were a rare occurance, it would be fine… but most of these jackholes say it after every hand. “8s 8″, “5s 5″, “120s 120″, “807s 807″. Those people and the binary All In or Fold twerps drive me away from more tables than anything else.

Yarr! Shiver me timbers! On the pirates versus ninjas debate, I fall firmly on the pirates side. When I was much younger, it was ninjas, but they have lost their flair. But pirates are on the upsurge. With the Pirates of the Caribbean movies among other things, the romanticism and the harsh reality of pirates is getting its due. And now of course I have given in to temptation and am playing Puzzle Pirates.

I think one of the best things about this game is that you can, if you choose, play for free. There are subscription oceans of course, for $9.95 a month (less if you buy 3 month or 12 month packages), and then there are the Doubloon oceans. In the Doubloon oceans, you can play parts of the game for free. Other parts require that you have a badge or pass to play, and those items are purchased with Doubloons, which in turn can be purchased from the game company. Of course, you can also buy Doubloons from other players with your Pieces of Eight (the money used in game). So, if you are willing to do the work, you can earn PoE and buy Doubloons from people who want to invest less time into the game. And just for fun, the games that require Doubloons are made free one or two nights a week so that you can play them and see if getting Doubloons in worth your time and effort, or cash.
Of course, earning Pieces of Eight isn’t always hard. While you might only earn a hundred or so from a sailing mission, on the nights when Poker is free, you can earn thousands of PoE in a single hand. Just last night I bought in to a table for 200 pieces of eight, and I left with over 2,000. And that was just a half hour or so playing.

Anyway, I’m still playing World of Warcraft, but when I don’t feel like dealing with it, for now I’ll be playing pirate. You can find me in the Hunter ocean (a Doubloon ocean) under the name Ishiro. Come challenge me to a swordfight.