A brilliant and perfect recreation of the collectible card game that eliminates the mess of collecting things.
Sadly, as good as it can be is not anywhere near enough for perfect to make the real life card game for everyone. Pieces break, packs occasionally ship with miss matched cards, it takes a tremendous amount of space to store fleets, taking the ships apart and back together can get tedious, pulling out masts and putting them back in has greater wear on the cards than most card games. To put it simply, Pirates suffers from only one flaw, and even that flaw is nitpicking in all its glory, it takes up physical space and requires that you spend large amounts of set up time and keep track of rules every single moment of the game, and trust your friends not to cheat. How many of us can really do that?
Pirates CSG online is a 100% faithful translation of the card game to the online world, allowing you to pick up a match with a stranger at four in the morning if you are so inclined. It lets you keep and instantly sort through any massive amount of cards, play on boards that are not limited to the size of your living room floor and almost completely customize every little possible tweak of the entire game, including rules for winning conditions, point limits, etc.
You will probably spend a fair amount of time in the fleet builder, outside of the game, tweaking your fleet, putting new ships in, taking old ships out, customizing larger fleets for larger games, and in general, maintaining your entire collection. It's an especially important part of the game to enjoy considering that all fleets must be built before joining a game and are not picked before a game.
Trading also works flawlessly, and brings that much more opportunity to customize your fleet. Something like this could easily be overlooked except for a few rules that make it exceptionally valuable. Only one ship of any type can be used per fleet, that means that any extras you have are exactly that: extras. Since an extra can never be used, it instantly becomes trader material, valuable stock to trade for anything anyone is willing to trade for it with. If this were not the case players might have stocked entire fleets with multiple copies of the same overpowered ship.
Sadly, for casual gamers, there's very few ways to simply jump in and play the game. It's unfortunate, because part of the game is actually labeled as the online version of the stand alone Pirate's board game. As it is, the entire content of the game is driven by small purchases of packs of cards that cost the same as packs of the real cards, which, compared with all the advantages of going digital, just seems slightly wrong as there's no physical component for the player to retain should the game ever be canceled. The nature of any collectible card game is what really lowers the value, obviously players who invest more money will have a larger advantage if they have also been lucky at getting quality ships and critters and crew in those packs. On top of that there is no letting two players draw from the same pool of cards, like you can in real life, allowing friends to play with the deck of a single player willing to spend more money than his or her friends for them to play with.
All in all, it is worth a try. People who will like this game will absolutely love it, and no one will hate it, though there will be plenty of people who simply don't care. The best I can do is recommend playing a sample game, which is available in the server even if you have not bought any cards.