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That’s a good question! Finding a word list to use was a bigger challenge than I expected. I ended up using a public domain one I found on GitHub, maybe it had too many obscure/archaic words in it.

That is good feedback, thank you! I’ll keep that in mind if I make any further word games.

Very cool game! Excited to see how it develops! I especially liked the writing and the visual style of the tiles.

Thank you for the feedback! I actually just pushed an update that addresses a couple of the issues you mentioned - the starting text is more up to date and the difficulty has been tuned down in general.

It was mostly inspired by games like Slay the Spire and Monster Train, but the timeline structure was actually largely inspired by Dark Souls and Elden Ring - I liked the way those games required you to time you attacks and dodges, and I was curious if I could do a similar thing in a board game! This grew out of the prototype board game I made.

That's good to hear, thank you! Hopefully I can keep it feeling an alright level of difficulty as I start to add more enemies.

My current plan to incentivize playing more than one card at a time is with cards that work better if you do so. Like cards that do more damage the farther out in the timeline they're played, or a combo tag that makes cards more powerful when two or more combo cards are played at once, or a card that can 'share' wait ticks with a card played before or after it. That way people who want to play riskier have an incentive to do so, while people who want to play it safe one card at a time can just avoid those combo cards.

If that ends up not being enough, I thought about adding a mechanic that would add 2 or 3 empty ticks at the end whenever you finalize a play. That would incentivize people to play as many cards as they could at once, to minimize those wasted ticks. I'm worried that would feel bad though, like a punishment. I think that's the sort of thing that can only really coming out in playtesting.

I might do that! It would be nice to have someone to bounce ideas off of if you'd be willing.

Thanks as always for your time and for the feedback.

Thank you for following along! I appreciate the time you took to play and to write out the feedback.

As you identified, due to the nature of the system sometimes it's not really possible to avoid damage. That's not something I want to eliminate entirely, because I think it's something interesting about the system and I don't want people to be able to dodge all damage (unless maybe they craft a really specific deck). 

But I also understand that it feels bad, so I've got a couple different things in the works that I think will help mitigate it.

1) Like you suggested, some more abundant healing. That might come in the form of better healing cards, passive healing, a shop option to heal, or some combo of the three. 

A lot of deckbuilding roguelikes in my experience are more about attrition, about preventing yourself by being slowly worn down by encounters. That's not really the direction I want to go with this, to the point where I've considered just fully healing after every encounter and lowering max HP significantly. Either way, more accessible healing is definitely on the todo list.

2) RNG mitigators - some of the next cards I have planned are ones that will allow you to draw additional cards, extend your foresight of the enemies moves, or allow you to adjust their length to better line up later cards. I'm hoping that those sort of utility cards will reduce the feeling of 'unwinnable' situations.

I was going to focus on some more UX changes, but thanks to your feedback I think I'll try implementing some of these items more quickly and see how the game feel changes.

Thanks again for the feedback, I really appreciate it!

Thank you! One of the cards I'm working on implementing at the moment is a summon card that will add a new 'ally' timeline on your side, so I'm definitely interested in experimenting in that space!