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You should be able to drag the cards from your hand onto one of the squares with dotted lines (which are the locations you are able to build on). Make sure you have enough ⚡energy to play the cards (cost of energy is in the top right corner of every card, and the total energy you have is along the bottom).

Just so you know, this game was designed for screens that are 1920 x 1080 or larger, so smaller screens may hide parts of the UI, and it's completely unplayable on mobile devices. Apologies! 

Yes some of the game isn't super obvious to anyone except us 😅 We wanted to achieve the rogue-like feel of "explore and experiment to find out what stuff does", as well as add to the replayability so you play again and again to discover all the "rules", but perhaps we went a little too far. In future versions, we plan to make some kind of first run of the game as well as add animation and sound effects to make it more obvious what's going on / what the goals are.  

As for your specific questions: 

What exactly was I trying to do to escape the solar system? You have to build up your ship / space station and pick up residents of planets along the way to make it out before the sun explodes, because you were given just a starter ship. So you can't fit everyone on at the beginning of the game since it's just a bridge.

If you meant why was I trying to escape the solar system? Because the sun will explode! And all the planetary objects will be destroyed. So get through all the planets as fast as you can before the sun goes supernova! 

Why was I able to add so few or so many parts to my ship? Each card costs ⚡Energy (denoted in the top right corner with the little energy symbol), which you have (shown in the "status area" at the bottom of the screen, with the same Energy symbol).  The amount of energy you have is written as "X/Y" where "X" is the current amount of energy you have left in that turn, and "Y" is the total amount of energy you can "hold" at the beginning of your turn, based partially on how much 👨‍🚀 population you have (which is based on how many beds you have), as well as how many farms you have (which produce energy at the beginning of every turn). So spending energy to build things is like asking the population of your ship to help out and build a farm, shield module, etc. Then when you end your turn, everyone goes to sleep and is well-rested the next morning, ready to help again! At least, that was the idea 😁

Why would I want to travel to different areas of the map? We wanted to give the same kind rogue-like feeling of choice by making a randomly generated, branching map. Each type of location (planet, asteroid, satellite, UFO) gives different benefits and presents different kinds of dangers. For example, planets always have a lot of residents on them,  so if you're build requires a lot of population, you should probably aim for routes that have planets on them. As for the other benefits or dangers... I'll leave that up to you and your play-throughs! (Note: we plan to make these more distinct in future versions, like potentially adding special cards only to UFOs etc).

 
Thanks for your time, appreciate it! 

Thanks! We heard about FTL when we started doing our research, and decided not to play it so we don't copy that game. But glad to know we've achieved the casual genre! 🚀

Thank you for your amazing feedback! We wished we had more time during the game jam to create more sound effects and music, but compromised with just one song. We definitely plan to add all the foley you describe to really build out the gamefeel, as well as adding volume sliders and other settings & accessibility features. Thanks again!

Thanks so much for the feedback! We did not have time to balance the game, but have plans to do so in the future. Although creating your own rules sounds like a fun game mode, where there's no real "restrictions" from the game and you can set them yourself... Interesting. Thanks for your time! 

Thanks for playing! We wanted to add more cards but opted to make at least a "playable" game to submit with plans to add more cards and support different strategies after the jam. Funnily enough, one of us like to stack all the sleep, farm, and shield modules, while the other one spreads out for the most amount of health and very little defense (since all the other modules get damaged before hitting your bridge).

Glad you enjoyed! 

Wow, i have never seen someone put so much game into a game jam! That was incredible! The effects were SO COOL, i was excited to drink the potion every time just to see the transition to the next room. I really like the idea of the wordplay to make a potion-- although the learn curve was steep (I looked at the first few answers), once I realized it's a word game over anything else I really had fun. 10/10 would turn into a mouse again 🐭

Although we can't play this game, the concept is so cool. Great idea to have a "circular story line" where the ending is you. Hope you get a first draft done and continue to work on it! 

Thanks so much! The dev actually learned HTML and Javascript for this project, believe it or not :o the artist had experience though, so together we were able to make a functioning game that's out of this world. We almost went medieval-themed, but switched to space 🚀 Thanks for playing!

Thanks so much for taking the time to play it! 🚀