It's had some interesting developments; new rules have been added, old ones removed... some new rules have already been tossed out. The toughest goal to attain is to keep the game balanced. Since all players draw from the same deck, there's always the risk that Player A gets lucky enough to draw all the "good" cards while Player B continually gets shafted with crappy cards. One solution to that is to have lots and lots of good cards, or at least self-balancing cards, but that's easier said than done. TaleSpin has self-balancing cards in the form of the randomized die roll effect on the character cards. Fatal Frame at the moment is leaning towards lots of middle- to high-level cards... cards that are almost always useful. Or at least situationally useful. There are no weenie cards that allow minimal effects - say, Draw 1 Card - because cards like that are just waste. FF's action cards are pretty much all really good stuff.

Die rolls are also big in Fatal Frame, which is another self-balancing feature. sometimes you roll well, sometimes you don't. Many cards assist in those rolls, therefore many other cards have to be included to remove those cards. I'm not sure I have enough of those yet. Much of that work falls to the Ghosts (for example, you might have to trash one of your Spirit Orbs because you rolled an even number), but that often isn't a direct approach. That might be the final frontier that I need to cover to polish off the game.

Out of the rules that disappeared during playtesting, many of them were proven to be completely arbitrary creations on my part. Usually because I'm such a slave to maintaining the theme of the source material. For example, I originally mandated that you had to travel through the Houses left to right. No moving backwards, no leaving the House until you get to the end of your dealt path. This was meant to simulate the video game's tension when you're stuck inside someplace running from unseen enemies. In card game form, it locked players into turns of doing nothing, often missing opportunities to boot. So now you can walk in either direction inside a House, even bailing out on your first turn inside if you don't like the looks of what lies ahead. In this case, I'm sacrificing the theming in favor of a design that keeps the players feeling like they're in charge.

The biggest guiding force in the development of Fatal Frame: the Card Game has been simplicity. As proud as I am of TaleSpin, TaleSpin's biggest barrier to entry is a pretty high complexity level; there's a lot of game actions that don't spawn from cards, lots of cards you play when it isn't your turn. Both of those facets lead to problems. I want Fatal Frame to be easier. Not easier as in weaker, or dumber... easier as in more straight forward, easier to learn.

I'm sure I could talk more about this, but if I go any longer it's just going to make even less sense since you likely haven't seen the game yet. So watch this space; it's coming soon. I can't hold on to it too much longer, because Tecmo recently announced Fatal Frame 3 for PS2 (maybe even this calendar year!) and my FF2 card game will be unceremoniously obsolesced when that happens.