I enjoyed the word-guessing game. I really didn’t expect the Fish Function to be literally fish or sea creatures at first.

I’m still not sure if the Diving for Treasure mechanism was going to be useful or just a diversion while waiting for Energy. I felt like there was a scam or alternative path to victory there somewhere, but after playing with it a little, I didn’t see much except for maybe the Pearl of Wisdom, and even then it didn’t seem like a big deal.

I’m sad I didn’t get to use the Bribing mechanism. I was hoping to sidestep Churn the Mind but I couldn’t accumulate Doubloons fast enough.

There was kind of a scam with Diving for Treasure. Move to the Ocean, descend instantly to depth 100 (gaining 2 madness, unless you have the Merfolk Charm), and Dive for Treasure, trying to get Treasure or the 5-8 Anomaly. If you succeed, you get 1DICE100 Doubloons, which is probably enough to win if you have enough time and Energy. Do this right before a Sight Disturbances so you have two shots at Diving for Treasure before anyone notices; roughly 50% chance of success. I put myself on the Obelisk next to the Ocean so I could Churn the Mind afterwards without worrying about the Speed encumbrance of carrying a lot of Doubloons. But in the end there just wasn’t enough time to make it work; if the previous Big One Caught resolved closer to the end of the week I think I would have had enough Energy to try it while the Churn the Mind was pending.

There was also a very situational scam with submitting catches. The check for duplicate entries happens on submission, not when determining whether the fish are In Season. So if you submit several of the same In Season fish in different Fish Identifications before they get added to the Found Fish list, you can get duplicate entries added to the list. In particular, if we somehow made it to the Last Call with only a few Found Fish, I was planning on submitting two or three copies of the Pearl of Wisdom fish in the hopes of sniping the win. Time and Energy constraints were making this increasingly implausible, however; Clucky did a good job of keeping the pressure up.

Various thoughts:

I also wasn’t originally thinking the fish function would be actual fish, or even words at all. The fish functions were almost impossible to guess based purely on submitted guesses (with maybe the exception of the first one), so that plus the fact that they were word-based made Churn the Minds too strong; I think maybe a more robust hint system would have helped (something like the last proposal and/or Pearl of Wisdom, but maybe easier to get).

The catch/move/identify cycle felt a bit too slow; I’m not exactly sure how we would have fixed it, but maybe more Energy gained from resting plus a lower Energy cap might have encouraged more action and less waiting around.

I proposed Diving for Treasure primarily as a way to slowly gain Doubloons over time without using Energy (I was very low on both at the time, so my prospects weren’t looking good, especially with Churn the Mind being the dominant strategy). I was a little disappointed that no one else used it at all - maybe the risk of 2DICE4 Doubloon loss was too scary? (Worked out for me since I didn’t have Doubloons to lose, but without anyone else using the system I didn’t have much motivation to try to make it more interesting.)

I thought for sure SigularByte was going for some kind of scam around submitting the Big One when they did Fish Identifications immediately after me two rounds in a row (maybe something about the phrasing “If a Fishing Contestant submits a string as part of a Fish Identification that exactly matches the Big One” possibly allowing for multiple people to catch the same Big One or one person to catch it multiple times), but nothing ever came of that. This was right around the time Clucky proposed to change the wording of that part of the rules - was this in anticipation of that scam?

I was also surprised that SingularByte dropped out in part due to my undercutting their Churn the Mind. It was a good tactical decision for me based on the ruleset at the time, but I wouldn’t have done it if I knew that would happen: I generally prioritize other people having a good time and engaging with the game over strictly optimal play (especially in Nomic, where a big lead early on doesn’t mean very much).