Brace yourself for swashbuckling puzzle action as you pillage your way to glory across the briny deep! Create and customize a pirate, collect booty, and join a player-run crew of cutthroats!

Smilin’ Jim wants YE! The Black Ship's skelly crew be a creaky lot after centuries o’ endless battle. Many yearn for the blissful peace of a final rest. Now her cap’n is desperate to find worthy replacements! Jim is skellifyin’ pirates n’ watchin’ to see who measures up! Time to tell ol’ Jim to look elsewhere fer fresh bones. Pirates deserve to keep their skins on. 'Tis cold on the oceans!

From now ‘til November 2nd, bash bony brigands to shut down Jim's recruitment scheme! Check the Full Details of the Competition for all the bare bones essentials. But beware, ye might face Jim hisself at sea with some o’ his best crew!

All pirates have a chance to earn trophies fer themselves 'n their team. Make no bones about it, only the bravest and most skilled pirates would dare to re-engage him after victory. A vengeful Jim is a dangerous Jim. Now go save yer skin before 'tis too late!

Lots of exciting changes are hitting the oceans. Grab a comfortable spot in your cabin to read the extensive full notes. The highlights of this release are below:

• The Auction House is open! Buy and sell items with any pirate on yer ocean at fixed prices, whether or not they're online. Post buy offers, sell ships, and find it all at the Palace.
• The Purser's Tally: Purser Pete has taken to checking manifests. Now and then he'll call for a tally, so complete each tutorial before taking a station on a ship.
• Blockade spectating: Any pirate on an island under blockade can now watch from the shore, no ship needed, with a spectator chat and Shout Outs.
• Logging on: A new gilded login frame, plus account search, sorting, pins and nicknames.
• Puzzle size and the game window: The new Puzzle Size panel replaces Display size, and the window remembers its size for each account.
• And more: crisper art scaling, plenty of booty and inventory improvements, and a heap of bug fixes.

What if getting better at an MMO meant improving your actual skills instead of chasing another gear upgrade? World of Warcraft and RuneScape set the stage, but Puzzle Pirates takes a different approach.

I grew up in the 2000s with a PC but not a whole lot of money. That's the kind of combination that gets you bargain-bin Sold Out Software games from Poundland or, more so in my case, an absurd number of free-to-play online and browser-based games that were utterly pervasive across the internet.

My childhood was a never-ending revolving door of these mid-tier Flash and Java games. Some have long left my memory, a fleeting experience. But some continue to rattle around in my brain, reminding me of simpler times where I didn't have to pay taxes or subject myself to at least one hour of screen-free time before bed lest I wake up with a headache the next morning.

But where are these weird and wonderful games now? Are they still scattered across the internet? Are they in their original forms, practically untouched, or have they evolved into far deeper and darker games than they once were?

Well, as I continue to march into my 30s against my will, I've been thinking back to the games I would play as a child and asking myself just that question. So why don't we go and check in on a couple of them?