
Had a lot of difficulty finding how to get into the actual minigames! It was very confusing landing on a page with just a title screen, the chest and a settings menu!
Just played the 2048 clone (that piece is a bishop and not a fool btw), it's, like, fine! However, there's really a way to play that allows you to just... Keep clearing the board forever. And since there's no increase in difficulty, no winstate, and no sense of progression, it doesn't really work as well as 2048.
I think 2048 doesn't just work because of the simple, very clean mechanic. It also works because there is an arc to the game: the more you play, the more complex the boardstate gets, because you must hoard the higher and higher value pieces, and thus your actions become more and more constrained.
So having a mechanic where your game pieces eliminate one another and disappear very often removes that tension and feeling of progression / mechanical arc from the game, right? You're just clearing everything every ~16 to 32 moves and there's just no real tension. (Except if like, you make a blunder and you have to kind of scramble to get out of it, but if you lock in for like 2 minutes there's basically always a way to get back to a clean board.) The gameplay / decision making stagnates (you play the same way at all time). (Which is also an issue with 2048, but much less front and center because of how the boardstate has to keep evolving because of how the mechanic is balanced)
+ The 2 incompatible colors system makes it a bit more likely to get boardstates that are a little "locked in place" and forces you into play patterns that aren't really fun.
I think I'd have enjoyed chess mechanics being a bit more present / a bit better exploited in the design of the game. Being able to fuse pieces of the same color, but also using the actual way that the pieces move in the gameplay? Make it more deeply "chess inspired" than just a coat of paint on 2048, right?