This was possibly the most innovative and addictive game I played in the jam. Wow, I had to tear myself away because it is just insanely satisfying to line up countdowns. That was my favourite strategy. I wasn't a fan of the added layer of complexity that a lot of the shuffle items entailed. I basically ignored them. But wow was it satisfying to carefully spend my +1s and -1s to line up a massively long chain for a countdown. The colour scheme also needs some work, something that lets players judge at a glance the gradient of values (perhaps high values are darker and lower values lighter?) and you have an absolute winner here. Absolutely legendary!
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Thanks for the kind feedback! Yes, the idea is that initially, countdown is the most powerful strategy (gives you multiplier for the number of tiles in your chain) but eventually the artifacts and items catch up or surpass it in terms of strategy, at least that is the idea. The +1/-1 and the items are supposed to help you get that chain, or work around your strategy.
Agree on the color scheme and general readability, I didn't put much thought in these but turned out to be essential (moved away from a single color gradient since consecutive colors tended to be very similar, but the alternative didn't quite work either).