I put this one in the B category. It had its moments, but for such a thin ruleset too much of it was either inert (coins, favourites) or distortive (buzzwords) for it to be an all-timer for me, and this was, sadly, one of those dynasties that was let down by player conduct.

one of the dynasties that made me kinda say “bleh, I don’t want to play BN again”. is it possible to have a player-vote-player mechanism without all that drama?

dynasty wise; kinda a good idea I think

I’m not sure what to do about the player drama. I guess we could have had secret voting, but I thought the public interaction would be better for player engagement. We certainly got the engagement, just in a negative way in some cases.

The loss of the Word Bank reset was a very happy accident. Turns out the challenge was preferred over the original idea. I also thought that Buzzword hunting was going to be Fools Gold, but it turns out a lot of people were enjoying the challenge and weighing the balance of losing Score vs gaining Points for letter matching. The choices made along these lines made a difference in the eventual winner.

The Art Broker and Photography dynasties were both drama free, from what I remember of them. In this dynasty there was maybe too much mechanical incentive for a player to publicly describe how much they didn’t like something (even if they secretly quite admired it), and to reject any feedback on their decision.

I was glad that it seemed to curve back around to playing out reasonably fairly by the end, that we skirted but didn’t get into players trading votes by revealing authorship in the final seconds of the voting windows.

(For what it’s worth my last second change of score on my own Kebabs Backronym was because I’d forgotten how the scoring worked for our own votes, rather than a planned fake-out. But I figured I might as well correct it at the last minute.)

In fact the whole dynasty did seem quite timing heavy, with a lot of actions being stronger if taken very early or very late, and some incentive to drag heels to control the game speed. I generally avoided casting my final Ratings in the evenings, to reduce the chance of a new Acronym being posted while I was asleep. I figured from the off that this was going to be a casual timing-exploitable dynasty, so leant into it rather than trying to fix any of that.

We probably could have fixed it once every Backronym was anonymous by forcing a delay on posting secret Backronyms until every Wordsmith had submitted one. The downside would have been a stretch of time where nothing public was happening, and I always worry about players becoming disengaged if they have nothing to do in those interims.

I could treat the nomic action as an accessory to the dynastic gameplay, and that alone means it was a good dynasty. It was soured a bit at the end by the permanent departure of a senior player, bad Acronym rolls and the revealed misinterpretation regarding Buzzword hints.

Nomic-wise I was happy how Secret Backronyms worked out - I figured my initial idea to explicitly make the final Backronym of the game secret might get some pushback (since I was a lead player who would benefit if people didn’t know who to downvote at the end), so I just put a general chance-of-Secret mechanic out there instead in the hope that the same idea would occur to someone else, and it did.

Yup - bad acronym rolls did kinda made my plans not really relevant (I was banking on that there would be at least one S acronym to catch up 3+1 points - a word is self containing and I don’t need to do BUCKY *that* way)

Thought this was a pretty excellent dynasty. Fun gameplay loop. Other than rerolling “KEVAN” a second time not sure what people are talking about with “Bad Acronym rolls”

KEVAN overlapped 4/5 letters with DARKENED and then BUCKY reused the K again.

I have a couple more tidbits about the Buzzword search.

The initial Buzzword search, with no information about their identities, made longer words exponentially more effective. As of RRBM I estimated (though based on letterset rather than lettercount matching) that “Misunderstandings” and “Upholstering” between them accounted for more word-list entries checked than everything submitted by other players combined.

It turned out there was a fairly quick and error resistant pen and paper way to check whether one word contained all the letters of another. Just step through the letters of the first word one at a time, crossing out one of that letter in the second word if it appears there. If you’ve crossed out the entire second word before or as you run out of the first word, it’s a match. For very long words, or if you’re checking the same buzzword a hundred times, it helps to sort the letters of the buzzword once and copy that for each check, so that it’s easier to scan for a specific letter.

And finally, I got “Upholstering” from notes from an unrelated word game that happened to make it useful, as an intermediate step, to figure out which of the words in a somewhat restrictive lexicon had all their letters contained in another word in that lexicon. Lacking time to scan the full word list before submitting that particular Backronym, I decided the peak words of those notes were a good enough proxy for Word List coverage. “Upholstering” built on “hungriest” there, which built on the very common root “hurting”, and it was also one of the longest words my existing notes covered.

K was a surprisingly common letter in player names! I regretted not trying for some unused K words as Favorites.