Me and my wife loved this game! We'll definitely keep it and show it to friends (once the quarantine is over :P)
As I mentioned in a previous comment, the rulebook doesn't cover some cases: Who starts first, where do straights start and end, what the value of suits or As are. Also the first card that showed up (moon laser in the Savannah) didn't mention what a flush is and we had to look it up. I might as well mention a couple typos: dice->die (twice), the draw->they draw.
We had issues with cognitive load with two mechanics:
1) It was hard to remember checking for Drawn effects of new cards, especially when we have to check the continent matching and what the new card's defeat effect is. Perhaps just the trigger penalty is enough? The cognitive load issue was even bigger because it didn't happen every time, and it had the same place as useful abilities. I'd suggest either removing the Drawn effect, or move it to a different section of the card and make all cards have something (sometimes positive sometimes negative) to make it easier to remember to check the effect when drawn
2) Remembering to bring the die down was hard. We wanted to be doing fun stuff instead and we may have forgotten to bring it down once or twice, it was hard to tell if we had forgotten. We had to remember which player got the new card last time to calculate who gets it next and see if the die is at the right score.
A way to reduce cognitive load is to link the new plot card to something else, that players do anyway or want to do. For example, you could place top 5 cards from the deck on the side, when that pile is over a new plot card comes and 5 more cards from the deck are placed on the side (ability card draws draw from the deck and not the new pile). Another solution would be to introduce 5 counters that go on top of cards when played, 'new recruits' could have an ability, eg they can't be discarded or injured, and when 5 counters are placed all counters are removed from cards and a new plot card comes. I'm sure you can figure out different solutions too.
Gameplay was pretty tight. 4-of-a-kind cards were especially difficult to deal with, though at least we knew that if a specific number was not in discard/injury/death it will eventually come. We managed to stay on top of things, the triggers were never too hurtful, we were always between 2-4 plot cards, and winning was decently easy in the end, but it always felt that things can go wrong. I would love to see increased difficulty rules!
We felt that the defeat conditions were pretty repetitive and not using the potential space. We'd love to see stuff like '5 even cards', '2 cards from each suit', '5 cards under 6' or '2 consecutive pairs' rather than more and more flushes and 4 of a kinds.
Overall, excellent work Robin, you found a great way to use a standard poker deck in making a small PnP game that has an amazing playing experience and has great variety and replayability.
EDIT: Fun fact, I realized I had no poker deck around, but I used a Tichu deck which worked just fine :)