Cards in PLOT are not just score. Every red card on the table moves the spies closer to winning, and at the same time hands the sitting president a weapon. That tension is the most interesting thing about the game: the spies' progress arms their opponents.
Red #2 — secret inspection
The president picks a player and privately sees their role. Nobody else learns the result, and nobody even learns who was inspected.
That secrecy cuts both ways. If you are police and you inspect someone clean, you have a confirmed ally — but nobody can verify a word of it. If you are the spy, you can invent a result out of thin air. So the value of an inspection lies less in the answer than in how much the table trusts you. The best use is to inspect a quiet player you intend to empower next round, not the person you already suspect.
Red #3 — peek at the deck
The president sees the next three cards on top of the deck, in the order they will be drawn.
This is the strongest police power in the game and the most frequently wasted. You are not seeing probabilities, you are seeing the actual cards the next president will hold. If you see three reds, you know the coming round will go badly regardless of who leads it — which means accusing the next president over what they play would be unjust. If you see three blacks, any president who then plays red has exposed themselves completely.
Hold that information for a beat, then use it as a test. Announce what you saw before the draw and watch who tries to cast doubt on you. A spy fears confirmed information more than anything else.
Red #4 — execution
The president picks a player and removes them from the match. If the target was a spy, the police win immediately. If they were an assistant, play continues.
This is the reckoning. The police do not need certainty to pull the trigger — a coin flip now beats a certainty after the loss. But be careful: the spies know this power arrives on red #4, and they start preparing a scapegoat from round two. Always ask yourself whether you suspect this player because of what you observed, or because someone else planted the idea.
Red #5 — public vote
An open vote among all living players; whoever collects the most votes is executed. A tie opens three minutes of discussion and then a revote among the tied candidates only.
The difference from execution is that the decision is collective and public, which makes the voting record itself information: who voted for whom, and who changed their mind after the discussion. If you survive a public vote as the spy, remember that everyone who defended you is now suspect by association — and that is the police's opening if they read it well.
Counting what is left
Strong players count. You know the deck size from the distribution table, you can see what has been played, and you know every round consumes three cards: one played and two discarded. From that you can estimate how red-heavy the remainder is.
This has a direct practical payoff. When the remainder is black-heavy, "I had no choice" becomes a much weaker excuse from a president who played red. When the remainder is red-heavy, ease off the accusations and put your effort into the powers instead.
What was removed
There is no veto in this version, and the "choose the next president" option that used to be attached to red #3 has also been removed. Red #3 is now purely a deck peek, and the presidential rotation is fixed and cannot be manipulated — which makes planning ahead fairer for both sides.