oh no :(
i agree that the tutorial is not the clearest and there are much things that should be explained in another way to be more understandable!
i'll answer your questions,even if i doubt you'll try again, but maybe it can be useful for next players too:
- the overall goal is to reach the highest round possible. a round has 3 phases: 1 where you throw your die, one where you buy upgrades and one where you protect your pips.
- the bonus works on faces of your die: you put an upgrade on one of the faces and voilà ! "extra dot" gives more pips on the face, so when you roll it on a later round, you'll get more points (for example a 2 becomes a 3, etc) ; "echo face" is like a multiplier: for example if you have an echo face on a 5, you'll get another 5 points when the die falls on this face, if you have 2 echo faces on a 5, you'll get another 10 points when you roll it, etc ; "shield face" acts like armor for the 3rd phase (the minigame), reducing your damage by 25% for each upgrade on it
- the minigame (which has a rhythm issue and is too long compared to the rest of the game) is the 3rd and last phase of a round: you have 6 "battles" in it, one for each face. for each face, you control the number of pips in this face and you must avoid the red dots, because if they touch one of your yellow dots for too long, this yellow dot is destroyed and the face it was on gets -1 (for example you're on a face with 6 pips, and you lose 2 yellow dots, then this face will only give 4 points when rolled and not 6. but to be fair, it's quite rare to lose pips on the beginning, it becomes something around round 7+ so i can understand you just saw that and had no idea why it was here!
- how to throw the dice is explained in the tutorial and tbh this is maybe one of the clearest things explained there haha
i hope it's a bit more understandable now :)