Ringo's Dango and Urumi's Stone Baby

Mutiny of Belittled Spirits is the second expansion and third Danmaku!! product we've worked on, and while there is still a lot of thematic space left in the Touhou universe, we have really run up to the edge of the mechanical space. One of the biggest constraints is our complexity budget. We have to constantly balance keeping the gameplay simple and appropriate for a party setting, while also very distinct and interesting. While we continue to add new decks, it's also worth noting that the amount of space people have on a typical table is not infinite.

That's why it's exciting whenever we find a new approach or mechanical hook, and we tend to design a bunch of cards around that hook. Sometimes it's something simple like multiple choice effects or cards that care about point values. Sometimes, however, we have an idea that doesn't catch on right away. Maybe our first attempt at it was bad, or perhaps it was just ahead of its time.

This was the case when we first introduced the idea of a token card. This is a card that is not shuffled into the deck, but created by a specific character's Ability or Spell Card. The player would get the token out of the box when needed. When that character is not in play, the corresponding token card would not be used.

Two characters that we knew we wanted for MoBS but had a hard time landing designs for were Mizuhashi Parsee and Kurodani Yamame. We struggled to find fun designs that captured the flavor of their character design – Parsee manipulating jealousy and Yamame manipulating disease.

Disease in particular felt like it should be a persistent debuff, but tracking this kind of effect over multiple turns is difficult. We already have some characters that leave a lingering effect (usually until the start of their next turn), but these have a complexity cost, especially with regards to tracking. They also don't permit complicated interactions with the effect, such as having a condition to turn it off or a way to pass it to others.

That's when we decided to bite the bullet and create a card that was basically just used to keep track of this buff state, and thus the first token card was born. It allowed us to create a design where the interaction with the disease is the interesting hook behind the character.

Whenever we find a clever new innovation like tokens we often look at the other cards we're stuck with and see if this could solve that problem too. Parsee's jealousy manipulation had been giving us problems, so we took a stab at using tokens to represent Parsee making that player Jealous and giving herself and advantage against jealous players.

Both of our initial token designs proved unpopular, so we scrapped them, but kept the idea of tokens in our back pocket for later. While we found a better design in the end for Parsee, we ended up circling back around to tokens for Yamame, as it really tied the fiction together.

Of course, even though we finished all of the characters for the MoBS expansion, we weren't done thinking about new designs, and in particular, other ways we could use tokens.

First up is Ringo, whose power is, I kid you not, "powers up by eating dango.” She was in the initial roster for MoBS but we ended up cutting that because how the heck do you represent dango in a card game? Tokens don't need to just be buffs or debuffs—they can also be items created by the character and used as a resource.

Another slam dunk for this is Urumi. She is based on a folktale of a woman who is holding a baby who asks a passerby to hold the baby. When the passerby takes the baby, it turns to stone and the victim becomes defenseless under the weight. Our version of Urumi doesn't exactly ask, but still saddles other players with a Stone Baby token that figuratively weighs them down. Unlike Dango and Disease tokens, there is only one Stone Baby, so it gets passed around.

Token characters come with real costs, including the literal cost of printing additional cards in a physical product. While we're including 8 disease tokens in MoBS for use with Yamame, this is a tradeoff for any future cards that want to use this design space, so we'll have to carefully balance how and when we use it in the future.