Thanks for your feedback, much appreciated.
Since this reminds me of Slay the Spire, I would recommend looking at the new player experience of that game.
This game is indeed directly influenced by Slay the Spire and adding more complex mechanics and interactions was central development goal. So some amount of extra tutorial is probably unavoidable. I will think about making tutorial shorter for more experienced players.
decrement absolute value
Many (most?) games basically opt to simplify every mechanics until it is easily explainable, which is often a good choice. However, this leaves a bit of uncharted design space and I try to explore that. For example, statuses in Slay the Spire can not go negative, which is definitely much simpler design. Just by changing that bit, I allow for plenty of new and interesting combos / interactions, but the price is the need to express such concepts as absolute value.
In this specific case, do you think “decrease if >0, increase if <0” would be better?
A lot of the UI feels small.
Since this is browser game, you can zoom in/out like normal web page. That said, I will consider increasing default sizes.
Icons instead of text would make everything look better.
You mean replacing some common words in card descriptions by icons?
It’s a bit difficult to read ‘fatigue + 1’, ‘defence + 1’ in the short time they are on screen.
Do you mean animations?
Some more visual effects / more prominent sound effects / screenshake maybe?
I agree, this is simply due to lack of my artistic ability. Will work on this part more.