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But if the space with an egg is already occupied by a body section or organ, there are times when a connection simply can't be temporarily sacrificed. For example, I've had several unlucky maps where chunks of ruins created bottlenecks where large sections of creature had to be connected by narrow tendrils of body sections with no room for defenses.

Eggs also seem to spontaneously respawn in closed cavities and occupied tiles- there are numerous times where I've come back to closed cavities surrounded by defenses to find a new batch of centipedes chewing up organs, despite having very definitely cleared the cavity out before.

Eggs being invulnerable to passive contact damage but having to be laid by an existing enemy (meaning you can clear and defend an area but breached defenses are very dangerous) could be fun.

Eggs being able to respawn anywhere but being vulnerable to contact damage could be fun. (You could passively block eggs by filling an area with creature)

Contact-damage-proof eggs spawning anywhere but also having an organ that blocks or damages them in a certain radius could also be fun (strategy about where to place the defense organs and how many you need, potential for upgrades turning eggs to resources, etc.)

Eggs ignoring your internal defenses and randomly destroying sections of your creature with no way to prevent this other than destroying those sections first? Not fun.

Echoing what others have said, this may be a very rough first draft, but it's got the makings of a fantastic game. (Please don't abandon it, this is one to keep polishing.)

The fusion of a deckbuilder with a shape-packing mechanic is a great twist, and the way that some cards leave items on the grid that can interact with each other has a TON of potential that reminds me a little bit of Backpack Hero. I'd love to see more of that as things develop.

Have you considered making the requirement something like "use X or fewer flags" instead of "don't use flags"?

Not being able to use them at all just leads me to ignore the mechanic entirely, so that I always get the bonus for doing nothing.

One of the things I find frustrating is that there's no reliable way to defend against contact-damage-immune threats that invade internal spaces, like worms and centipedes, and their eggs- needlers can't target them, and tentacles can only attack their own square, so you can only watch as they chew through critical body segments, and spawn more from also untouchable eggs.

Something like an organ or evolution that negated contact damage immunity for nearby tiles, or that allowed tentacles to protect neighboring tiles would be game-changing.

To also minimize spoilers: there are windows where the rover can be supplied with sufficient power without the generator, and taking the upgraded water recycler allows skipping certain extremely time-consuming scavenging options in favor of reaching places earlier.

That would be another good example of an incremental