I wanna start off by saying this is such a beautiful breakdown and reading this made me so happy. I also wish that I had time to make a tutorial for the game, a lot of these details would be in that tutorial.
Okay so you are mostly right, almost everything you said was spot on.
To Play:
Completely correct. The deck is supposed to disappear once its exhausted, but for some reason it did not end up working in the final build?
Setup:
Ace is indeed high only, though I wanted to add low as well.
Deck is spot on: 54 cards with 2 jokers, no repeats.
Play Values:
(I really don't know why I made money only visible in the case, I thought it looked cool but from an accessibility standpoint that was a very wrong choice.)
Your play values are correct. I meant to make a Two Pair worth more before I finished the game but I spaced it. Jokers would have been in the tutorial as a "free money" card.
Fun fact: Jokers can never start as the trick card, but can be changed into the trick card via the "Death Save" chip
Shop:
I love how you categorized the chips into effectiveness, and I completely agree with you. I think the extra money chip could use some tweaking, but I tried to avoid must buy chips every game (obviously failed with the death chip)
The explanations for the chips in the Useless? category could have been longer if I had the foresight to create a new popup for the descriptions of the chips. These were ideas I had early on and I thought that they would be good, but then realized close to the end of the jam that they were not that good lol.
Your Strategy:
Love this part. Your breakdown is very thorough and concise. I don't have much to say about this part, it's very good.
Closing:
I didn't even realize that the end screen could be taken as which card was the trick. I was trying to think of ways to show which one was, and I didn't think of that somehow but its so obvious. I ended up not getting to it in lieu of other features, but if I ever clean this project up I will certainly add that.
Thank you for this breakdown, it's so cool to me that someone would take such time with one of my games. I'm sure to other creators who's games you've done this for feel the same way.
I'll likely add most of this information to the itch page when the jam is over, I'm not sure if I can do it right now. Sorry if you felt that there wasn't enough information on how to play and you had to make your own tutorial... life got in the way of this jam for me and I couldn't add everything I wanted to :(