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Red-White Revisited: Detoxifying Reimu
🕑 Added 2022-04-06 20:42:01 +0000 UTCIn our team meetings, Carrot is always telling me he regretted how we implemented “Fantasy Seal,” Reimu’s signature spell card. The spell has several issues. It’s complicated for new players, its net-fun is negative, and you can actually hamper yourself with it. Having the primary protagonist of Touhou have this kind of implementation isn’t great for Danmaku!!.
Pretend for a moment you’re a new player. Wtf is a Danmaku card again? Invocation? How good is it to ban those card types? You don’t know. This implementation of Fantasy Seal depends heavily on your knowledge of what’s in the deck and how useful each of these options is. For the new player, this spell card represents an immediate barrier to effectively playing the principal character of the series.
Back in Danmaku!!’s alpha stage, Party actually healed all players instead of giving everyone cards. We scrapped this because it just made the game longer. Fantasy Seal’s ban on Danmaku or Invocation cards actually does the same thing, except it's worse. Banning the primary attack cards makes the game longer while at the same time forcing players to do very little on their turns. Un-fun! Boring!
But what if you ban Dodge cards instead? Well this is where Reimu’s spell card can work against her. Reimu’s homing shot Ability already gives her an advantage over other characters in terms of accuracy. By banning Dodges you make all player’s accuracy the same, removing your advantage and possibly getting yourself in trouble.
We had a few goals for Reimu’s revised Fantasy Seal. Reverse the trend of the old spell and make it new-player friendly, by both being easy to understand and removing the option to shoot yourself in the foot. It also needed to be net fun. While you can’t expect the target of a spell card to be happy about it, the entire table shouldn’t groan.
Reimu’s new Fantasy Seal is much simpler. It is a Seal Away with added card draw on top. This spell card is easy to understand and is always useful, no matter the board state or Reimu’s role. It also synergizes with Reimu’s homing shot, allowing her to overcome defenses and get those youkai exterminated.
Comments
Xavier Fajardo
Hello, it's been two years and got to play a 7-players game with her being a heroine. Yea, we went 2 rounds of not been able to play danmaku, spells and items due to players using Capture Spell Card and Impossible Spell Card. I think just adding, "other players can't activate this Spell" would be a great way to fix her.
Bega0922
Agreeing with Sisale, I think this new Reimu Spell Card misses out on the uniqueness of Reimu's Spell Card. While old Reimu does have a lot of problems, especially with stalling the game, I personally liked the idea of restricting a certain card type. Maybe some sort of disuasion from playing a certain type of card, rather than an outright ban would work better (like discarding a card to play the banned type). Either way, making it a seal away + a card, does feel a bit bland, but is easier to understand for newer players. (Maybe have an option to have the simpler Reimu, but still have an original-esque Reimu?)
Xavier Fajardo
As someone who has the honor to play this game physically with friends who also like playing this twice a month. I do agree with this change. Her spell stalls the game massive, I've played her while getting the jeweled pagoda on turn zero..... yea, I did lost a player to ever playing this game in the future.
Sisale
Not a fan, simplyfying a unique bomb feels stupid. Especially so when compared to some of the new characters in MoBS.
