Some chatter on Slack that Sidekick has no downside, but this is only because Pokes proposed to remove its downside while being a Sidekick, with nobody objecting to it.

As originally written, a Sidekick duo would be slightly worse off than a pair of players who’d teamed up informally, as the Sidekick player wasn’t allowed to submit an accusation - the other team could make twice as many guesses, if the endgame came down to guesswork.

(That link was meant to be https://blognomic.com/archive/accusations_3, not sure how it lost the underscore.)

I suppose Sidekick also had the downside of giving away that an alliance existed, and putting a big “probably closer to winning than you” target on that player’s back.

Even without Accusations 3, and even working alone, being a Sidekick would have a minor handicap. If I knew all the properties myself, someone convinced that I had them might be willing to make the accusation for me in exchange for a small chance of keeping the mantle, lest I find someone willing to keep an even smaller chance.

True. But if their Accusation gets the thumbs down because it had a red herring in it, you don’t get to make a second guess. Accusations are a very precious resource.

How much were people double-checking possible red herrings? (I kept analysis of incoming moves to a minimum, to avoid giving anything away accidentally, so wasn’t really following this.)

I liked how (maybe this was just contained in my own head) the endgame was about how to balance double-checking with getting an accusation in before someone else - where a merely single-checked accusation is better to get in early if you think someone else is itching to accuse, but a double-checked accusation later is better of not.

I admit the intent of my last 3 proposals was in large part to signal “hey, no rush getting in those accusations right now.”

better *if not

I enjoyed this dynasty. As always, everyone’s creativity with the characters and situations was very amusing. In general, the negative traits seemed more detrimental than positive traits were beneficial, as it appears Trigon figured out early on.

It didn’t occur to me when proposing it, but I liked how the drawback of negative traits changed based on information gained - if you were very confident about the Location or Motive and didn’t intend to search for more clues about them, you could take Scruffy and Arrogant with no penalty.