Touhoudle

About Touhoudle

Touhoudle is a fan project built around Touhou Project, the shooting game series by ZUN and Team Shanghai Alice. Its home page sums it up as one Touhou character every day, and offers several daily modes side by side: Classic, Image, Music and Cover Blur, with a Knowledge quiz marked as coming soon. The site says plainly that it is non-commercial and not affiliated with the series' owners.

In Classic mode you type the name of any Touhou character and get a row of clues comparing it with the day's answer: the game the character comes from, the stage, the location, colours, a fumo column and species. Green marks a match, orange a near miss (higher, lower or partial) and red no match. You have up to 20 attempts, shown as lives and bombs in the style of the shooting games: each miss spends a bomb, and running out of bombs costs a life. Difficulty sets the pool: Easy covers Touhou 6 to 11, Normal Touhou 6 to 20 with the half-numbered games, Hard reaches back to the first PC-98 games, and Lunatic takes every character.

Image mode shows a picture of the day's character that reveals more after each guess, using blur, zoom and black and white depending on difficulty, and lets you skip a turn to see more. Music mode starts with 4 seconds of a track and adds 4 more after each wrong guess, up to 20 seconds, with five guesses in all. Cover Blur asks you to name a Touhou game from its blurred cover in eight attempts, and harder levels add comics, artbooks and music CDs.

Beyond the daily set there are extra challenges (Classic Extra with six attempts and hidden cards, Music Phantasm), endless practice modes, private rooms for two to five players, a streak leaderboard and a card collection called the Touhoudex. An account is optional and keeps your attempts and streaks in sync. The interface comes in English, French, Japanese, German, Spanish, Russian and Portuguese. It suits players who know the series well enough to tell Hakurei Reimu from a stage 3 boss, and Easy gives newer fans a smaller cast to start with.

How to play Touhoudle

1. Open Touhoudle and pick a mode: Classic, Image, Music or Cover Blur.
2. Choose a difficulty; it sets which Touhou games the answer can come from.
3. In Classic, type at least two letters of a character's name and pick one from the list.
4. Read the row of clues: green is a match, orange is close (higher, lower or partial), red is no match.
5. Narrow the cast with each guess until you find the day's character within 20 attempts, then try the other modes before the reset.

Screenshots

Tips

• Start on Easy if you know only the Windows games from Touhou 6 to 11; Hard and Lunatic add the PC-98 cast and side characters.
• The Game and Stage columns cut the cast quickly, so open with a character from a mid-series game and a middle stage.
• In Image mode, skipping a turn reveals more of the picture without using a guess on a wild name.
• In Music mode you can answer with the character or the track title, and each miss buys 4 more seconds of the clip.

Questions