I like this game a lot, chess is one of my favorite games so any twist on it is fun. At first the cards were too much reading so I just played chess, I could complete the first 5 levels without using any cards. Then when I started getting green cards, I read what they did and saw that the card "Freeze" could stop any piece for 2 turns, so I came up with an OP strategy: at the start of the round simply freeze the king and then take it with the queen. It worked well since the ai didn't seem to take this into account.
I lost my run because I misunderstood the card "The Queen's Gambit". I though it would allow me to play twice in a row after sacrificing a card, so I sacrificed my knight to allow my queen to play twice but it ended up not working and I lost my queen.
I think you should spend a bit more time making earlier levels, with less pieces and especially less cards. Check Balatro to see how it introduces new jokers, it does that really well.
The cards also need either to be more concise or have some kind of image that could make it so we can easily identify them. When I got bombarded with 5 cards full of text right at the start I didn't even bother reading them and just started playing.
I hope you'll keep working on that game, and if you ever want some help with it don't hesitate to reach out to me :)