gameplay mechanics I thought worked well -

Hustles and Plans were nice. Had a nice mix of public info and info you could determine if you were careful about reading the gamestate.

Possessions sans the pouches I think were well done

Endgame mechanic I think wound up being really cool

Distribution mechanic was a fascinating social experience. I don’t think it went the direction people expected at the start, with us never really trying to deviate from a fair split with the exception of one haul where we tried going selfish and course correcting and another where there was some disagreement about what “fair” means. But in the end, I think it all still worked well

gameplay mechanics I’m more mixed on -

Pouches had promise, but I think we needed to do a bit more with them. Shame no sort of stealing mechanics ever materialized. So wound up really just being a lot of busy work.

Notoriety burned Juniper badly but other than that, the “need to get a 1” made it so that you were only really in danger at really high levels. I think it was a cool idea though.

don’t think there were any mechanics that were total clunkers other than gambles which literally never happened

Yeah, I wish we had done more with stealing from each other, more than just the Informant hustle. I tried that one Proposal, but once that failed, I didn’t try to revisit it.

I too was fascinated by how we naturally made cooperation in Hauls the default, rejecting selfish or unfair approaches for the most part.

That seemed a pretty good dynasty, although it took a bit too long to get out of entirely trackable information and scrupulously fair haul splits, and into the secrets and bluffs.

The most interesting lesson may have been from Punts, which bordered on being a counterproductive timeout mechanic - I got the sense from The Needleworker Haul that Clucky, Jonathan and possibly NadNavillus (who were all absent from the burglary) would have been happy to see that one go to 48 hours and time out, so had an incentive against reminding 4st and Juniper to respond to it. In a round-based game without Punts, there’s no reason not to remind the less absent players to take their turn.

I’m still not sure if the group managed to agree on whether a Punt was a bad thing (loot is lost!) or a good one (more loot is added!). But I guess there was enough of a social sense that each Haul should be split according to people’s Plans at the point of acquisition, so timing out one Haul and merging some of it into the next would put each heap into a different context.