I’ve gotta admit, this took me an unreasonable amount of time to figure out - I played it like three times over the course of a couple of days until it finally clicked.
I think the mechanics were so hard to understand partially because the animations whizzed past so quickly - the fears played by the ghosts are probably the most important piece of information communicated by the game, but they disappear so fast that my brain didn’t even register that they were trying to communicate something the first few times I played. When I figured out that some of them are discarded and some stay for the next round, that’s when it finally clicked with me. If I were you I’d definitely make the feedback animations play out a lot slower, so the player has the time to take a look at the result of a given round and check whether they hit any weakpoints.
It also didn’t occur to me for a long time that you could stack the jokes you play. I don’t think this was explained in the itch page at all, and ends up being really powerful if you know what you’re doing.
Overall, I think rules-heavy games don’t fare well on game jams because most people just aren’t going to want to give jam games too much time before they switch to something else. I think tutorializing the mechanics in-game would have made a big difference as well - for example introducing them slowly, maybe pointing out what to look for. I guess that’s more of a deadline issue though.