From here, I was prompted to choose a name, gender, and various physical attributes for my pirate. I chose a black haired female sea wench, dressed in a well worn bodice and skirt who is named ieatbugs.
Once my pirate was created, I was placed on a ship whose captain was a non-player character. He directed me to a station to begin my first on board duty, the game of Bilge. While being instructed in this game, the goal of which is to align 3 pieces of the same type together in order to lower the "bilge" water which builds up on the bottom of the ship, my "mission" was listed as: Learn Bilge.
During the sea journey, there are various "checkpoints" which are labeled on the map. When ships reach the location of a checkpoint, the status of all crew members, their stations and performance (which can range from "Good" to "Poor") are displayed to all members aboard a ship. Throughout the day there are a variety of "Navy" ships, which are run by NPCs, for any character without a crew to join for a pillage. During a pillage, the ship Captain will be on the lookout for other ships to engage in a sea battle.
During a sea battle, the Captain must manoeuvre the vessel among rocks and winds to a position where they can fire their cannon upon the opposing vessel. This may sound like a fairly simple task, but given a time limit and being required to plan out each move without knowing the move the opposing ship will take first presents quite a challenge.
Once a vessel has been attacked and successfully grappled by an opposing ship, they may then be boarded. A swordfighting puzzle ensues, where each member of the ship plays a game with an objective somewhat similar to tetris.
If the opposing vessel is defeated, partial contents of the ship's cargo hold will be transferred to the victors. This may take the form of PoE (Pieces of Eight, the game's currency), commodities such as hemp oil, rum, or madder root, or the elusive Kraken's blood, which is required for all black dye but can only be pillaged from high level brigands, granting it a very high worth in game. When the destination is reached, the pillage is complete and PoE is split amongst the players. Commodities are generally sold to restock the ship with necessary supplies (a ship is not able to pillage if it lacks enough Rum for each pirate to consume).
Upon disembarking from a ship, the user is greeted with the scene of a sea-side town which meets them at the dock. This presents them with an entire world of opportunities to explore, a mission board to help find crews looking for jobbers, shops seeking laborers, as well as more NPC training demos for all of the other in game puzzles.
Images from http://www.mmmorpg.com and YPPedia.
(note: I was unable to play SecondLife on my computer due to hardware constraints.)
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