Sorry that it took so long - been having to much work to do the past week.
I recorded myself playing your game, I hope this is useful.
Thank you so much for your feedback :)
Well, I would not say that you failed :)
However, doing iconography is REALLY HARD.. as in EXTREMELY hard. When doing UI, the general rule is that you should never just have an icon without a lable, and if you choose to have an icon without a label you have to lean heavily on conventions within the genere you are dealing with, or spend a lot of time on really understanding and getting under the skin of your user.
NNGroup have a really nice article and a short video on this, which I would recommend.
https://www.nngroup.com/videos/icon-text-labels/
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/icon-usability/
So, you had an idea of a clean interface without having to think about text and translations etc.
You suceeded, because I figured it out in the end.. but I had to fail a few times, and you would like to avoid that.. so failing a bit without consequences first could be the solution to the problem here :)
Also, if you want to record yourself playing games, both Mac and Windows have this natively - and as you noticed, seing me playing is a high value... if you are shy, or dont have a microphone that is usually not a problem :)
I am planning on making this video one more time a bit simpler and shorter :)