So yes, I was just waiting for somebody to attack me so that I’d hit zero and could respawn with 50 Prestige - I assume we’d all realised that this was the only guaranteed way to heal back up, and was starting to get worried that players might coordinate to avoid killing off the leading player. Was considering proposing some more mechanisms to heal players back up (beyond the Marianas Trench), but was worried about drawing attention to my situation if I overdid it.

Brendan was right about the Military being intended as a safe target for a smaller Kaiju, with the worst case being that the larger Kaiju spent time and resources smacking them down. I was mostly doing bread-and-butter “propose a thing that gives an advantage to you and about half of the other players” stuff towards the end - which I suppose gets easier when the proposal queue is a little quiet and floating voters feel they ought to keep things moving.

In retrospect, I should have set up a high-token bonus for killing off the Emperor, but I wasn’t sure how to allocate them (person who did the most damage? person who knocked me down to 0? what about if I restarted from 50?). I was pretty sure the only way to take me down would have been an alliance, and wanted to encourage that, but without the higher incentive there was no real reason not to go after smaller targets.

I wondered if anyone would decide to fight me with the Military by setting them as Right Claw, then outbidding me on Rubber Suit to make 1-point bid increments possible again. Again, though, not enough incentive.

How did people feel about the Claw system? I like that it ended up contributing to the final victory, but I suspect that with this few active players it was more an obstacle than an enhancement.

I liked the Claws, it gave an interesting conflict between backing a successful player to get free Might Tokens, but not being able to attack them directly. Was maybe a bit too easy to switch out the Left Claw when needed, though - I didn’t hit any real dilemmas, and found it easy enough to punch Sylphrena and Darknight out while swapping my Left Claw between them.

Disappointed there wasn’t much scope for alliance and betrayal, given the courtly theme - when the playerbase dwindled it didn’t really seem worth it, I suppose. I still want to see a dynasty end with somebody recruiting a “just do this one thing for me and I win” accomplice who can choose to betray them and leave them worse off: I’m thinking of trying a dynasty based on Diplomacy (which I’ve never played), to encourage that.

Was Tekneek paralysed into peaceful indecision by having so many Right Claws pointed in their direction, out of interest? They could have taken down the Emperor single-handedly by Lab Researching a Thousand Cuts.