Yesterday we stopped the game in middle because of arguing about one unclear thing in rules that did matter quite much in the course of game.

So, the question is - if it is said "discard", does the discarded piece goes to the pool or it's ouf of game ?

And this time the question arised about conspiracy pieces, as discarding them out of game, in my opinion, would ruin the game balance (as you can still gain conspiracy bonuses, even if you cannot add the piece to the main conspiracy puzzle, so, imo, it should stay a legal option as long as there are unused pieces), yet the other players where against me in this matter and insisted in discarding conspiracy pieces completely out of game.

In the case of the conspiracy puzzle, and pieces that you cannot or choose not to place are removed from the game.

In the case of evidence tokens however, discard means to return to the pool of unused tokens.

I don't know about game balance, but it would be kind of weird if people could continue to reap the incidental benefits of trying to unravel the conspiracy solely by virtue of the fact that the only remaining piece(s) didn't fit...and as one approached that point, the primary function of the conspiracy would become much harder to carry out as the unlinkable pieces kept getting mixed back into the draw pile.

The only issue I've really found with the discard rule is that if later events make the piece playable, it's no longer available to play.

In one game, we had the situation where two spots were blocked, but the player who placed the final piece had drawn 2 due to a light card and had to discard the second. Raymond then twisted a piece, making it possible to connect to the trapped spots, but the discarded piece couldn't be regained to complete the puzzle.

Since there were 12 victory points tied to that missing piece (plus it was the Jinteki link), it does seem a bit unfair and reducing of special powers like piece twists to remove the pieces from play completely. It wouldn't be so bad if there was an excess but there isn't.