Can someone tell me the purpose of the Utility Belt item card? All it seems to do is replace your four action cards. What is the point of it?

The only thing I can think of is if you use it in conjunction with another item card that says "play one action card and one item card", allowing you to take two actions that turn.

But that means the only time you'd ever play it is with another card, which really limits its functionality.

Is there another purpose that I'm missing? It seems pretty useless to me.

The Utility Belt is really handy because it lets you take your action in response to what other players have already done, since normally everyone chooses their action at the same time. So for example there's an Interface token on a room and a player before you Interfaces and discards the token. If you had played Interface too, you'd be SOL, a wasted action. But if you played the Utility Belt, when your turn came around, you could opt to do something else. It's really nice when going last in a round.

Oh, sneaky! I love it. Ok, that's a great application.

Still, I think it'd be much better to be able to re-use it. I think I'm going to add a house rule that says you can return it to your hand instead of discarding it - it just seems too weak otherwise.

I think being able to reuse it would be kind of broken, to be honest. Committing to an action is part of the strategy of the game, and being able to constantly change that, I think the player who had the Utility Belt could run away with the game, or at the very least have a slight edge over the other players.

But why don't you give that house rule a shot? Maybe I'm wrong