Dropping these keywords was a deliberate push on my part. It always feels like a wasted opportunity to me when we say tautological things like “these actions you have to take are called the Mandatory Actions”, “these lists of effects is what we technically call an Island’s Lists”, “the quality is that sets up the timing of our turns is called the Turn Timer”.

I think it’s much easier to internalise the rules and build on them coherently if we use thematic keywords. Making these actions into Global/Local, Underground/Overground, Rock/Water or something (renaming and/or moving the actions to fit) would be more engaging and intuitive to play with, and suggest new mechanics for them which “the actions which are mandatory are the Mandatory Actions” doesn’t.

I see your point—I’m not usually a fan of Blognomic Magical Capitalized Words Mania—but we’ve had enough recent proposals struggling to specify “the list of actions which begins with etc etc” that it seemed like an obvious place for cleanup. (And there’s a scam fix in the change to the optional actions list as well.)

Ah, fair point. Maybe I’ll take a stab at some other adjectives for them as a follow-up.

I’m not sure the scam’s there: you choose “some, all or none of this list” of actions and then apply them, and I think there’s a huge implicit “once” hanging over that. If the step just said “Carry out the action of Venting”, I don’t think a scammer would get anywhere in arguing that it didn’t say they couldn’t carry it out a thousand times.

, anyway.

definitely like being able to go “Add this to the list of mandatory actions”