Thank you very much for playing the game and the feedback! :)
Good to hear you could figure out the rules yourself. That's actually kind of the approach we try to achieve: giving minimal guidance and then the players are hopefully interested enough to discover the rest by themselves.
It's interesting to hear that the play felt kind of meaningless to you, until you took some damage. We also had the opposite feedback in previous versions: damage too early; player should be able to clear all card more frequently. Of course there are different tastes about difficulty. I guess we have to try and find the sweet spot by making continuously small adjustments.
Thanks for the input, we will consider it and try to improve the onboarding for the players.