Hello everyone,

Moogs and Carrot here. We’ve received an amazing number of preorders for Traditional Festival of Paradise. We’re blown away by your love for Danmaku!!.

We’ve owed you an update for quite some time. Some of you have noticed the estimate on TFoP’s release moved from Q1 to Q2-3. The reason for the delay is a combination of writing the 60+ page rulebook, typesetting on the nearly 500 cards themselves, and for good measure patching out some late-breaking bugs identified in the last Beta release.

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TFoP Rulebook Preview

The new rulebook, which you will get a preview of today, contains rules for the 10+ years of Danmaku!! development. We promised many of you we would make things new player friendly, but we can’t be there to adjudicate your games. So we spent many hours writing concise rules for your first Danmaku!! game, and even marked the cards you’ll be using in that game.

You can find this in our Quick Start Guide, which is also included as part of the full rule book.

Danmaku Rulebook Quick Start Guide

Danmaku Rulebook WIP 2026-04-19

But that’s just your first game of Danmaku!!. We expect you to play many games with many different setups. In the new rulebook we’ve included handy charts, advice on playing different roles, house rules, and even recommended setups.

There are still roughly 10 pages that haven’t been typeset yet, covering rules for Flowering Night, FAQs and rulings for certain cards, artist and Patreon supporter credits, and maybe some bonus material if space allows.

As always, we welcome feedback, so if you see something that is incorrect or unclear in the rule book, now’s the last chance to get those suggestions in before we send it to the printers.

Incidentally, we also switched from using the nightmare of an open source dinosaur that is Scribus to Affinity Editor to write the rule book, and it’s been a huge improvement on workflow and quality.

Goodbye Scribus, you won’t be missed.

Card Changes

Trick Shot & Spell Assist

As many of you requested, we’ve patched out the ability to infinitely pass Trick Shot and Spell Assist cards back and forth. Both now say that once handed over, the new holder can’t use that mode this turn. Sadly this was needed.

Mask of Hope

The intent of Mask of Hope is that you can put it on someone to debuff them. Previously, the owner could choose which artifact they keep and just get rid of Mask of Hope. Now, if you’re over your Artifact limit when you receive it you must keep Mask of Hope. You cannot refuse this gift.

Reisen Udongein Inaba

Notoriously one of the characters that can lead to some very confusing game states, we had some specific interactions we wanted to make clear and slightly nerf. Long story short, Reisen’s Ability now explicitly only triggers once per card played, no matter how many players are attacked. On the other hand, she can now redirect it to a different player who was already attacked by that card. This makes cards like Wide Shot better, while Twin Shot is slightly worse.

Yagokoro Eirin

Because Danmaku!! is a team game, we designed beneficial cards like 1UP and Graze to be something you could just play on other people. Originally, this was what Eirin’s Ability did — she could play cards on behalf of other players. As more and more cards were made like this, though, it basically nerfed Eirin’s Ability out of existence, so we felt she needed a redesign.

Eirin still has one of the best Spell Cards in the game, so it would be too much if we replaced her Ability with something that also generated repeatable value. We opted to lean into her strengths and character lore and give her 1 free emergency activation of Hourai Elixir. Eirin remains one of the best Partners in the game.

Sakata Nemuno

Nemuno’s Spell Card allows her to lock someone in a “sanctuary”. Previously, it prevented other players from playing Reaction cards. You could do some clever tricks with this, but it gets into exploit territory when you introduce mobs. The new version is an even harder lockdown, but it includes Nemuno too.

Yamashiro Takane

Takane’s Spell Card gave people extra hand size during another player’s discard step, which let her hold onto the cards she drew, but didn’t matter if she had to discard them immediately next turn. We changed this to last until her next turn. At the same time, “no max hand size” was problematic in other ways, so we toned it down to a “mere” +3 max hand size.

Scarlet Mist & Dream World

This incident has given us some issues as we’ve struggled to land on something that fits thematically and also doesn’t drag the game to a crawl. The idea of a creeping mist settling over the land and make it dark enough for vampires to walk out in the middle of the day hasn’t helped. Our previous version refilled players’ hands every turn, and even a toned-down version that only drew two cards each turn was enough to effectively read as “take this round off.”

We had one promising idea for an interesting incident. What about an incident that turned all Spiritual Attacks into Capture Spell Cards? People love activating other characters’ Spell Cards, so it seemed fun and relatively safe, but the flavor just didn’t hit.

It was a perfect fit for another incident we already have though: Dream World. Doremy and the dream world connect to the “perfect possession” events in Antimony of Common Flowers, so we stuck it there. Luckily, we were a bit iffy on the original Dream World’s tenuous thematic connection, but it seemed like a much better fit for Scarlet Mist, so we made the swap.

Season Balance

We discovered that at some point in making the combined main deck that we broke the balance of seasons. For our latest export we’ve changed around the seasons on the main deck cards so there are equal numbers of each season for both the 60 card simplified main deck (with the yin yang symbol) and the full 100 card main deck.

Alice’s Dolls

Originally, the four dolls were part of a single image, and thus they had a single background, even when we separated them into four illustrations. This made the cards very hard to tell apart at card size and at a glance. We went back to the original artist Deji and requested new renderings with skies at different times of day to help the dolls stand out. We think she did a wonderful job!

New Role Cards

One thing we’ve done with every expansion is add new extra boss roles that lean into the expansion mechanics. We didn’t get around to adding this for Wolf of Black Market before the last update, but wanted to get some in before the final version goes to print.

First up is the Wily Boss, who upgrades into the King of Beasts. As the representative of Wily Beasts and Weakest Creatures, this boss has complete control of the new animal spirits piles, able to scoop up a free Eagle Spirit or a highly discounted Wolf or Otter spirit each turn.

Next up are the undisputed ruiners of people’s lives and dreams (financially). The Racket Boss upgrades into the Black Marketeer, who realizes that only suckers actually pay for what they can get for free. Each turn, they can choose to take a gamble and draw a card directly from the market deck. Will it be trash or treasure?

Finally, we have the Market Boss, who leverages their core competencies in order to evoke a paradigm shift as a Market Leader. Unlike the underhanded Black Marketeer, the Market Leader operates entirely above board, monetizing their assets so they can capitalize on extra discounted exchanges each turn. Think of the shareholder returns!

Jilted Boss

While it’s not new, we rebranded the OTP (which was a placeholder name) to Jilted Boss, keeping with the “such-and-such Boss” pattern. We also had to remake the art for it and got possibly a better cast of characters on it.

Expansion symbols

Animal Spirits icon

In the process of combining all of the expansions into a single box, we removed the expansion icon from most cards as it was unnecessary. Instead, we repurposed the expansion symbol to indicate a dependency. When a role or incident needs a specific expansion deck, we put the expansion symbol in the corner of that card. While we made a symbol for Wolf of Black Market, there are two components in that expansion — the market deck and the animal spirits piles. We used the existing icon for the market deck, and made a new one for animal spirits. Feelin’ kinda cute.

Cards that received the new icon include the new extra bosses, Hell Invasion, Hieda no Akyuu, and Fish Spirit.

As an aside, the designs of our expansion symbols have all been based on character sigils as seen in Grimoire of Marisa. Can you identify them all?

Starter Characters

Just as we added the yin-yang symbol to 60 cards from the main deck to make a simplified main deck for players’ first game, we also pulled out 14 characters we think are iconic and also friendly to new players and put the same yin-yang expansion symbol on them. These “starter characters” are called out specifically in the Quick Start Guide for use in players’ first game.

The following characters are starter characters: Hakurei Reimu, Kirisame Marisa, Cirno, Patchouli Knowledge, Izayoi Sakuya, Remilia Scarlet, Chen, Konpaku Youmu, Yakumo Yukari, Yagokoro Eirin, Shameimaru Aya, Kazami Yuuka, Kawashiro Nitori, and Hijiri Byakuren. We think this is a nice balance of simple mechanics and popular characters.

Typography Stuff

One of the quality improvements we’ve made in TFoP is switching from building cards as pixel art (using a pipeline of Magic Set Editor and Photoshop) to vector art using Adobe Illustrator. While the transition has had its… challenges, some of the advantages include crisp frame design and advanced typography features.

Adding fl and fi ligatures supported by our primary font.

We were also able to fix some places where the automatic kerning on the font made it look like spaces were missing, especially when a sentence was followed by a capital Y, T, or W. This had to be done manually on every card, but we had enough people bring it up that it was worth it.

Before and after. It’s subtle, but it helps readability at small font sizes.

Most of the work, however, goes completely unseen. Good typography is nearly invisible. It involves a lot of 1% adjustments and manual line breaks to ensure maximum readability. These are just a few examples of some of the polish we’ve done to bring the presentation up to a level we’re proud to call the definitive version of Danmaku!!.

Full Changelog

1. New content
1. Swapped Dream World effect to Scarlet Mist
2. New effect for Dream World (changes all bombs into Capture Spell Cards)
3. Updated dolls with improved BG art from Deji
4. Added three new Extra Boss roles (Wily Boss, Racket Boss, Market Boss)
2. Balance changes
1. Removed infinite replay for spell assist and trick shot
2. Mask of Hope changed to make it kill other Artifacts
3. Set Takane’s max hand size to +3 until the start of your next turn
4. Changed seasons to rebalance for equal seasons in both the “simple deck” and the full main deck
5. Sukuna Shinmyoumaru now only swaps character cards with her small version when she loses life from an attack, instead of whenever she gets hit (slight nerf with Jizou Statue)
6. Reworded Reisen’s “do-overs” ability to only trigger once per card played
7. Changed Eirin’s passive ability to a brand new one. “Help me, Eirin!”
8. Fixed exploit involving Nemuno and the mob deck, Nemuno also locks herself in the “sanctuary” now
3. Typos and text changes
1. “Choosen” -> “Chosen” on Cirno’s spell card. (Must be genius Cirno)
2. “is attacked” -> “are attacked” on Chen’s spell card.
3. “Bhavagra” => “Bhavaagra” on Tenshi’s title.
4. Fixed spelling mistake “disard” => “discard” on Niwatari Kutaka
5. Fixed Toutesu Yuuma’s Spell Card name
6. Replaced “unused character pile” with “character deck” on several cards
7. Changed “destroy an Item” to “choose an Item and destroy it” in most cases
8. Reworded Dragon Gem Motherlode for clarity
9. Fixed World of Doors overflowing the textbox (and cutting off the last sentence)
10. Fixed Maneki Neko and Blank Card wording to say “You must spend at least one card to exchange.”
11. Removed out of place “and” from Blank Card’s rule text
12. Renamed EX-OTP to Jilted Boss (OTPs don’t break up)
13. Animal spirits no longer use the term “flip” since it means something else already. Generally fixed the readability of the animal spirits cards.
14. Updated copyright year to 2026 on all cards without killing any Adobe Illustrator devs
4. Graphic design
1. Fixed slight discrepancy between the frame of characters depending on their spell card. It was really noticeable when browsing image files in a viewer
2. Mobs cards now have a landscape card back to go with their landscape card orientation
5. Expansion symbols
1. Added expansion symbols to starter characters
2. Expansion symbols added to Prismriver Sisters and Midboss Ascended
3. Added Animal Spirits icon (How dapper!)
4. Fish Spirit and Hieda no Akyuu get “Animal Spirits” expansion symbol
5. Updated Hell Invasion to have animal spirits expansion symbol