Ah, such wonderful and thorough feedback, thank you! It's so nice when somebody grasps the idea behind a game immediately. Yes! This system was absolutely built to encourage walking on the metaphorical razor's edge.
The issue with the spreads, I think, is that the margins are very small compared to the 6x6 pages and I really occupied every inch of real estate that I could, here, and because I largely designed with singles in mind there's not enough negative space in the divide between pages to encourage the eye to sit and stay on one side of the page, consume the content, and then move to the other side.