Thanks a lot for the thoughtful feedbacks!
The discovery part was a strong pillar of game design, that meant some players had fun discovering things, but also meant other players didn't understand some aspects of the game. We should have ironed out these edges with better visuals, iconography, and other techniques.
We are really sorry for the harsh difficulty spike. I'm planning on making some balance changes and pushing a small update after the jam! It looks like a lot of players are having problems, we didn't plan well enough to allow some room for playtests and balance on the final days, lesson learned.
Good pointer on the boardgame thing. The game actually started as a random soup of ideas around objects that you could interact on a table. I have never seen a board game with living flies to kill and then turn into coins too haha, after some prototyping I thought the fantasy of a board game could make sense, but maybe I should think of a better theme to wrap everything around it if I take the project forward