This was really neat! Great implementation of the wildcards. I wish I could have figured out the "significance of the fish". Alas, I am too dense.
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Haha, thanks. It's really not that deep, you can 100% complete the game without them but you are not alone - there's only two in twenty-five comments that have explicitly mentioned that they figured it out. As a (very bad) clue, you could listen to what they say. Or just observe their behaviour either in the sea or on the map.
I want to add that I appreciated that you covered so many different input modalities! "Accessibility" is a hard one to rate since I'm not playing with a screen reader, but you made extra effort to make sure that people could play in whatever way they found most comfortable, so you get full marks in that one.