For the second time now, I've started playing Puzzle Pirates and given up after a week.

I really, really wanted to get into the game this time. I love the design and overall feel of the game, I can play puzzle games for hours on end, and they even came up with a clever payment scheme for people like me who are scared of subscriptions. They've added a few more puzzles and parlor games since last year, too, but it still only took a week before I got so bored doing the same things over and over that I couldn't concentrate on them any more. The payment scheme actually backfires here, since it lets you translate game money into real money; an hour of pillaging might yield 2000 pieces of eight, which is roughly equivalent to 2 doubloons, which costs about 50 cents. Fifty cents versus an hour of increasingly tedious puzzling? It's sure tempting to just pay your way through the game.

Finally, I hit the same wall as last time: I just don't enjoy interacting with strangers very much. The next step in the game is to join up with crews and climb the promotion ladder until you're captaining your own ships and pursuing higher-level goals in the game, like moving cargo, running shops, and ultimately taking over islands. All of that requires a lot of people-wrangling, which sounds more like work to me than fun.