Beat it. Golems are very strong at present, being able to transfer both the #Blood and #Fire tags in chains around the map, while also being very common cards in the purchase phase. Furthermore, all of the enabling cards they need either start in the player's deck (ghouls, rivers) or are common (Hellfire/oilslick, cinders, Yagahut). This seems to make them significantly better than 'rarer' cards like Cerberus, Ghost, or Rat King whose enabling cards are either significantly rarer and more expensive or very limited in number and entirely outside the starting deck. Most of the current drawbacks to golems-- the way points are counted in the final turn of each round before all the points you might expect from golems are fully calculated, the way the triggering order for multi-golem chains in a single block is complex and somewhat intractable (and the same for river conversion, if your golem is dependent on to gain its #Blood tag), the way they don't gain tags when tiles are placed adjacent to them after they have been played-- are mostly only significant penalties because they are unintuitive and unexplained. It seems like, provided the player is capable of predicting the behaviour of golem tiles and planning accordingly, every deck should include golems, which I think is a sign that they are a problem for balance presently.
Thanks for playing and the in depth feedback! Those are some really good insights. The point counting on the final round is a bug, and triggering order / the way they interact with the blood rivers are things we need to do a better job of explaining.
The plan for trigger order was that abilities that are "tied" for execution order (like golems and other golems) would execute top to bottom, left to right (like how you read a novel), but that is both unexplained and I think currently not working correctly :D
About the golems and blood rivers, those are another thing we should explain better. Just for your sake now, and if there's anyone scrolling into the comments to see how it works, all "when placed" abilities, like golems, rat kings, etc. trigger first. Then "every turn" abilities happen, like rivers checking for #blood, or rats checking for other rats.
Thanks for the reply, and for making a fun game! The top to bottom, left to right thing is what I eventually figured out and it works ~90% of the time, but it definitely doesn't work 100% of the time; good to hear that's a glitch. I've not seen a golem chain propagate right to left in a single block, but I've seen it trigger the bottom golem first several times. Is there a chance rotation might be messing with it? I don't think it's happened when I've not rotated a block but I suspect that's just a coincidence or it would be happening a lot more.
Also I just found legion for the first time and it doesn't work with Golem (and I'm guessing other on-place effects either, since doppelgangers don't grant turns when becoming clocktowers but do cost turns to remove). Also if you get two or more level ups simultaneously, like for example by playing legion on a hellfire or other high-value card while having lots of available blood river space, the animation plays several times but you only get one level up, at least if you decline a card.
The balance patch seems to have tweaked a lot of things in a good direction, but there are some more bugs:
Werewolves eat ghouls placed next to them, but not yagahuts.
Werewolves don't eat other werewolves, which is certainly important for their ability to trigger, but contradicts their absorption text and their having #monster.
Cabins count off-map spaces as empty (which is probably good for balance, but not what the text says)
And some of the changes were detrimental imho:
There's no longer an indication of how many points you need to get your next upgrade past what's needed to beat a level. (The bar does look snazzy, though, so I wouldn't suggest going back)
Yagahuts don't get the chaos tag anymore, which sucks hard since that was pretty much the only reason to take them :( I see that the building tag is rarer now, and tenements have been very significantly buffed, and some of the new cards care about #building but the broken synergies will be sorely missed.
the additional cards makes the game more rng heavy (which is constrictive on the diversity of strategies), since even common cards aren't going to reliably show up with your allotted rerolls now. I'd recommend increasing the rerolls per upgrade by one or allowing players to permanently remove a card from the supply when Declining or something.