Getting ready to run this for a small group tonight, first time playing for us all. I'm finding there's a lot of ambiguity that is making it hard for me to grasp the gameplay loop.

The first note is that how to write a secret confusing - the only guidance given is "write a secret" and clarification that bird-related secrets are their alibis. Since there are no examples listed, I'm finding this hard to picture. Metatextually I can assume that this is a Clue-style format where "a secret" about a weapon is a flavourful way of saying that you know that weapon was not used in the murder, but since the appeal of the game to me is the bird-character setting, knowing what to picture would help.

I also can't be sure of that assumption either, since the rules only state that bird secrets are alibis, but not anything about weapon secrets, and then there's a lot of rules referencing "if the secret is an alibi" which seems to make it an important distinction that not all secrets are. This kind of leaves the role of weapon/locations secrets in the gameplay loop unspecified. Alibis are relevant to winning the game but weapon/location secrets don't seem relevant to anything.

For Suspicion, I didn't understand that Suspicion was a gameplay value for a while. "Secrets" are a concept so I assumed "Suspicion" was a concept, but based on reading some of the move descriptions I had to work out that it was an actual number-based mechanic. The Suspicion rules also say "if the murderer reveals themselves they can attempt to pin the murder on the bird with the highest suspicion" but the murderer wouldn't know that they're the murderer, so I'm not sure I follow why or how a person might end up able to do that.

I'm also curious about the secrets in the nest; in theory you would have 4 secrets per player and then each draws 3. That only leaves a few secrets in the nest - less the murderer's name, there'd only be 4 cards in the nest in a 5-player game. Since there are a lot of rules involved in drawing secrets from the nest, I guess it just feels a bit odd as you would run out very quickly and then mostly be left with interrogating the other investigators after your first turn.

I know that's a lot of feedback at once. Just letting you know as it might help others in the future to clarify these further!