Wow lot to unpack here, very impressive game for a jam!
Pros:
- Visually the game is very appealing. The card art feels fresh and unique to your game despite simply being playing cards. The setting/backstory is wonderful. I love the sort of Alice in Worderland monarchy style of world and think this is an area you could lean into much harder to really give the game more character.
- Player has A LOT of agency over the gameplay. Between the playing, discarding, and scoring, there are so many different paths a player can take action to action. This lends itself very well to a rougelike as it allows the player to experiments with different strategies run to run, even when using the exact same deck!
Cons:
- This game's learning curve is STEEP. Even as someone who has played a lot of deckbuilding rougelikes, I still struggled to find a good strategy within the combat system. There's a lot of moving parts turn to turn and it can feel extremely overwhelming as a new player with only a block of text as your tutorial.
- Some cards feel far too punishing for their effect. I felt this with the Hanafuda cards in particular (I love the inclusion of Hanafuda card aesthetically though). Their energy cost and score penalty felt far to steep for their effects in addition to also being a dead card for poker hands. I eventually just found myself just skipping these all together and felt like I had a more powerful deck for doing so.
Overall the game is oozing potential and was still very enjoyable to play in it's current state. Very well done!