You are so right! we also found that building with open spaces allows to achieve most of the tasks but that it takes awa from the pleasing aesthetic. We already had some ideas on how to fix this.
The boardgame aesthetic was definitely a choice, we love board games ;)
You are very right concerning the sound effects, we just decided to focus more on mechanics and visuals for the jam, adding sound in case we continue working on this.
And lastly saves and savestates would be a must, i totally agree. also a free-building-mode would be cool. We built some really nice worlds while testing ourselves and were sad to end the game, haha. We cannot say for now though what will happen :)