Yeah, my biggest issue with this was the amount of "I have no idea what this is going to do" except that snakes kill and steeds possibly carry me out of danger. There needs to be a Tooltip, at the very least, to show what the card types are for after the start; it'd be nice to have them numbered up in the corner somewhere so that even when the cards are not on the table you know which ones you have left.
Also -- although perhaps you've already accounted for this -- in playing the game through a second or third time, it'd be nice to see the number of choices that you haven't taken under a given choice, making it easier to hunt through and find paths you haven't yet explored. And maybe it could keep track of which cards you used on previous encounters with a given location/scenario (and perhaps provide you with a "mystic view of the future" or whatever, as to what lay down that path (that you already tread last time)), so that you could decide whether to use the same card or a different one.
Overall, pretty enjoyable! Although I wasn't sure if using the snake card at the start was a key factor or just one of many in the ending I got. I'm a Spade, so it felt right to do the thing that most good-style players wouldn't use (plus, at the time, I was under the impression that perhaps the snake would do something other than kill).
That's actually pretty much what I was hoping people would pick up from a first run. The exact effects are up for grabs - the steed has the ability to weep money, for example, which I would hardly expect anyone to guess up front - but basically boil down to benevolent/non-violent versus threatening/lethal. This was partly an exercise in giving the player abilities that would never be universally good or bad, so killing things with the serpent is a "right" choice as often as not (and likewise, the steed is only "good" in situations where it won't leave other travellers stuck with whatever threat you use it to escape).
I have been thinking about including some kind of expandable menu/footer (partly because I'm considering adding audio and should probably have a switch to toggle it on and off). That might offer an unobtrusive way of letting players check what cards they have. It could also just be shown in the corner somewhere, but I'm less confident of my ability to drop it in neatly than I am setting up some kind of show/hide function.
Including a system to track and describe already-seen choices could be neat, but would take an amount of work that I feel is disproportionate to the amount of use people would get out of it. However, I might be able to use colour-coded hyperlinks to track previously visited passages without too much trouble: you wouldn't get a reminder of exactly what the outcome was, but you would have a small clue on screen to indicate that you'd made that choice at least once already. I'll seriously think about it for the Android version, since I imagine that anybody who goes to the trouble of installing the thing would probably be more likely to try and explore all of it.
Thanks for the comment! I'm really glad you enjoyed the game.
<beelinespan class="beeline-node">Remembered links would likely be sufficient, especially as you get near the end of the game and even if you tried to get 100%. (I'm not generally a 100%er, but I am a Spade, and digging into the little details of a small game is a lot of fun.) Kinda reminds me of a pattern I saw once for a computer that taught itself a tiny (3x3) version of chess... and was made out of matchboxes, no electricity involved. (Every time the human wins, remove the bead that indicates the move that made the computer lose. Eventually, the computer becomes unbeatable.)</beelinespan>
<beelinespan class="beeline-node">The lack of always-good or always-bad options is a nice touch. I have a storytelling card deck I've been designing with that general theme, which is kinda based around balance or wisdom (the portion of wisdom that judges when to use Tactic A and when to use Tactic B and when to choose a third option). Like how following authority can be good in one circumstance and bad in another, or how violence can be appropriate in some cases but not in others, or how Nature vs. Technology sometimes goes one way, sometimes another, or how loyalty is not a positive quality when it ties you to a bad person/force. Even the Loss cards are understood to be a positive change sometimes, and other times a road block that you get stuck in and need to move beyond.</beelinespan>