This is great, but the need for a long glossary of terms is a sign that you might want to keep tuning language/word-choice.
As you've seen in replies here already, many term choices you've made have enough variety in how they're conventionally used that people incorrectly assume they know what it means only to see the "nope!" popup when they try to apply it. That frustration is going to spoil first impressions of what actually seems to be a really great puzzle system, which is a shame. The more you can reduce that experience, the less likely you'll be to prematurely burn off players.
A good measure for getting it right would be that you don't even need a glossary at all, or that you can get it so condensed that you can make it more prominent without becoming distracting.
Alternately, you could maybe use symbols instead of words to represent your rules, as more players would intuit that they should learn the symbols before making (wrong) assumptions.
This is great feedback, and I think you're spot on. It's been really challenging to find wording that is brief enough, but also specific enough. I hope it's something I can improve in the future as I keep exploring new ways of giving hints. The idea of using symbols is interesting, hadn't considered that!
As you've seen in replies here already, many term choices you've made have enough variety in how they're conventionally used that people incorrectly assume they know what it means only to see the "nope!" popup when they try to apply it. That frustration is going to spoil first impressions of what actually seems to be a really great puzzle system, which is a shame. The more you can reduce that experience, the less likely you'll be to prematurely burn off players.
A good measure for getting it right would be that you don't even need a glossary at all, or that you can get it so condensed that you can make it more prominent without becoming distracting.
Alternately, you could maybe use symbols instead of words to represent your rules, as more players would intuit that they should learn the symbols before making (wrong) assumptions.