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I've been working steadily on it since the competition closed and will have a much improved game to release in the near future, complete with an actual tutorial and tons of bug fixes and new enemies and features. Thanks for playing it!

After watching your videos, I do see some bugs, and one of them looks like the spontaneous damage you mention. The monsters healing is a bug. You taking damage from your own turn is a bug.

"wouldn't it reduce the likelihood of drawing one that's contextually useful...?" -- YES!

Killing chickens for their runes is voluntary (unless they are blocking your path). And you can see their color ahead of time so you know what color rune you will get. But understand that the game is incomplete. There are some mechanics that I intended to have that I just didn't get to. I am continuing to work on the game though, and hopefully will solve some of these problems.
To answer some questions:

For onboarding, all I had time for was tooltips :(

Order doesn't matter.

You can only lose health from walking into chickens or when then enemy takes a turn in combat -- nothing spontaneous. 

It is meant to be like poker and Yahtzee -- there is some overlap there. You can lock runes and redraw once per turn somewhat like Yahtzee or draw poker.

Mana is only used for your lightning spell to kill chickens. It's not well balanced currently.

There are a few sad bits. I accidentally left the last boss with 1 health. There is no way out of the dungeon. You can go to lower floors but they are empty. My next version, after the competition closes will resolve these issues.

One of the big pieces that didn't make it in, is that you will eventually be able to play up to 3 runecards at a time. You will redraw runes each time you play 5 runestones, but if you have to play an empty runecard, it will damage you, like the spell blowing up in your face. Runecards will have properties on them that are more interesting than All mana x2 and All damage x2. I envision wild runes, cursed runes and ways to prune your collection. You'll eventually do millions of damage and be rewarded for overkills. You'll also face monsters with millions of health.

Thanks for playing and thanks for the feedback!

Thank you.

There are tooltips that say what you can play when.
But basically, match a color or a numeral to the previous one played. Or you can match +/- 1 on the numerals to try and get straights, like in poker or Yahtzee.
You want to get 3, 4, or 5 of a kind, colors or numerals, or a small straight, like 3,4,5,6, or a large straight, 2,3,4,5,6, or a full house (a pair and a 3 of a kind together). These give you big multipliers. All the multipliers get factored against the number on the card for final values.
Red runes do damage.
Green = healing
Blue = mana
Yellow = block
Purple = weakness curse

Thank you for the kind words and for playing my game.

You can press M to get a full screen map.

No, you can't pick up any items. It's a feature I had to cut for time.

I totally forgot to put the final boss's health back after I was testing killing him. All the very rough edges you encountered come down to the fact that I simply ran out of time and was really rushed at the end. If I'd even had time to play through my own game once, I bet it could have been a lot better. Thanks for playing it and leaving feedback!

One feature that is something that I haven't seen in crawlers before is the Backtrack spell. I didn't get time to tutorialize it. Press 'B' to see what happens. It's a quality of life spell.

Yeah, I simply ran out of time. I only got enemies in the level in the last hour of the Jam and I never got a chance to play through it. There is one door that I know of that will only open from one side, but all the other doors should open with a lever or a pressure plate.

I meant for there to be random levels, and they are there, but they are empty :(
So I made the first level huge.  There are two bosses.
As far as combat goes, it's all in the bonuses. You can do 2 damage, or you can do 2,000,000 with stacking bonuses. I found the straights are easy to get early on.

There are about 20 chickens to find to get more runes.

I want to spend more time on it and fix the bugs and add more content, because I think the combat can be fun. The cards will eventually be rewards from fights and have Slay The Spire type abilities to make combat even more interesting.

Thanks for checking it out though! I almost decided to quit the Jam because I didn't think I could even get that far. I worked straight through the last 30 hours.

It should be patched now so the play and quit buttons work.

Ugh. I put in a text element last second and covered up the buttons. Seeing if I can get it patched.