Hello, thanks for taking the time to share your experience. I hear you that you miss the timer. I miss it too! The new system is less original and less deep. I still think it was the right decision to change it to the bomb and I'll explain why:
We're pretty set on not having a tutorial (because we like the feeling of figuring things out for yourself!), which means we have to make everything very intuitive. It probably doesn't feel that way, but many of our decisions since the beginning have been meant to make the game easier to learn. The time has been something that *many* people have been confused about. One of the most confusing things was that lots of people thought the game was played in real-time! If you think it's real-time it's hard to disprove that notion, since you start playing fast and then it seems like the game is speeding up... it's bad. Putting a timer there sent the wrong message. It was also hard to tell just how much time you really had left since you have to convert everything into minutes. Separately from the understandability stuff, I also wanted to get rid of the cost for flipping cards. I noticed that it felt bad at the end to choose between seeing your build "pop off" by flipping a couple extra cards but knowing that you're technically misplaying if you do that. So if we're removing the cost to flip a card I thought it'd be better to just simplify the whole thing into a round system.
The bomb also makes it more clear what the stakes of the game are. Now when you look at the screen you see "oh shit, if these lights all light up I'm going to die" where before many people wouldn't realize what the time was doing until it was too late.
I agree that it's a bit less deep and a bit less original but I hope you trust us to keep working on it and adding depth and originality as we go (in other places, not the timer).
Wow I wrote a lot - I love talking about the design of this game! I hope this explains why we made the decision we did. For you and anyone else scrolling the comments :)
About Mr Magpie - I'm a little confused about this point because it's the same 3D model. Are you talking about the lighting being different?