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Well, that explains a lot. But for people from the outside (or lazy like me) it will be unintuitive and frustrating. Would be nice if you could somehow introduce player to this in game. Maybe some small storyline?

Yes, definitely, now that the game jam is concluded I can work on the game and improve it, especially adding in-game information about how to play and why of some restrictions. Need to make a brief story around it ;-)

Ok. Now I understand why there were those die rolling sounds. You could tweak the description with some better spacing / die icons. Should be much more intuitive for more casual players.

Yes, I supposed to add a die with the result and show some sort of battle log, but I scrapped the idea for the jam, postponing for later.
There will be an option to show those calculation for players that wants to see them.

This leads me to another issue - I've seen creatures with blue progress bars. I didn't know what they really are until some creature got damaged. I was suspecting some kind of mana / energy and that damage bar is not yet implemented due to my bad luck and miss mechanic. I think you should stick to the convention and use green bars. I would even argue they should be horizontal.

You are right, originally they were green, but the colour was confusing a bit with the background, so to avoid issue for players that might have visual difficulty, I changed it to blue for higher contrast. Will probably go back to green having an outline or such.
I tried to have horizontal bars, but initially that wasn't working because in my first game layout, creatures were overlapping to give a sense of dept, I then discarded the option due to the difficulty of showing the lifebar and understand which one is which, especially on small screens as mobiles, that's why the design changed as it is.  I like the idea of overlapping the creatures, so I might find a way to show them in that way, probably another option that players can take advantage of, when playing on computer screens.

As you can see, having the bar horizontally would be confusing if I do the overlapping. I will play around with these options and see what I can do to make it looks nice and at the same time be functional :-)

I agree. But i still think it should be easier said than done. I think Hearthstone's Taunt mechanic would fit here much better. It should provide very interesting choices and game dynamics. You could put some barricade to protect your weak hero. Oponent could counter that with rats who could still be able to breach it. Some bigger creatures like Troll, Ogre or Bear could have taunt too and maybe only swift/flying units could pass em. Maybe you could make em blind / frozen or apply any other cool counter effect.

It sounds a good idea to me, it's similar to some of the additional cards I planned to have. There will be more stuff than just creatures in order to create different combos ;-)

Thats cool for me. But for many lazy users it may be a big blocker. You should think about some form of guidance explaining the core concepts - especially those unique for your game. I know it's a lot of work and not for a game jam. But now you have little bit more time I suppose :)

You are right, and as said at the beginning, in-game info is one of the first things I have to develop to let players understand how the game works. Unfortunately no one wants to read any more manuals :-D

Thank you again for contributing to the development of Grim Grimoire! :-)