Mechanic Exploration: Character Swapping

I’m sure many people have thought of character swapping mechanics for Danmaku!!. Mamizou and Nue’s character cards are based on it. When it comes to playable cards that change a character however, one runs into several issues.

1. Character swapping should be rare. It becomes a hassle if it happens too much.
2. It’s time consuming for a player to choose a new character if they’re given a choice.
3. In a perfect world, swapping a character is only situationally useful.

The lunatic deck is the default place for cards we don’t want to show up all the time. The main deck cycles extremely quickly so it’s out for this type of thing.

But that is where the conflict lies: you are spending a lunatic card on an effect that is only situationally useful. Once you’ve trolled your friend, you are down a gold card and only marginally better off, if you are better off at all. But hey, this is the card of the month club, so let’s not be afraid to make mistakes.

First off is Banned!, a card with a name that breaks the fourth wall and might have some kind of fiction that an oni woman has pounded the target into dust, then through some unexplained phenomena reincarnated them.

This card has two effects: first, it ends ongoing effects from a character’s ability and spell card, then it forces them to pick a new character. The first effect is one we decided should be on any card that swaps character cards. Part of it is to match the fiction (having lingering gameplay effects is hard to justify when the character changes) but more importantly, having ongoing effects for a card that is no longer in play causes all sorts of memory and tracking issues, and possibly some confusing or outright broken game states. It’s safer to just clean everything up first.

While this card is themed as an offensive play, you can actually change anyone’s character, including your own. Because the chosen player gets to pick their new character, you’re probably often better off seeing yourself out than removing someone else’s character when it could end up being a stealth buff for them.

The next card up is Bodyswap, which has an equally terrible name and a fanfiction premise. We feel it still doesn’t do enough to justify being a lunatic card, because it’s even more situationally useful than Banned!. However, it does have two major advantages: it’s much faster to resolve, because none of the players are given options they have to decide between, and it puts all of the control in the hands of the person playing the card.

Banned! could have been upgraded to let the person playing the card pick the new character, but we thought that would probably lead to too many feelbad situations for the other player, and result in overall negative net fun.

We decided we wanted to combine all of these effects. We wanted a character swap card that felt like it did something, was more smarmy than unfun, and was quick to play. Enter Moonbrain, which combines the effects of the two cards. With Moonbrain, you get a third character card and you arrange the 3 characters among the two players you chose however you please.

A few points on Moonbrain:

• It ends ongoing effects
• It allows you to break up the synergy of up to two opponents at once
• It allows you to completely remove a character that’s giving you trouble
• It allows you to change your own character if you need to
• It doesn’t take too long to resolve, since you know two of the three characters before playing it
• It still has a really dumb theme

With these changes, we believe Moonbrain reached a point that strikes the right balance between playability and net fun. What’s more, it’s just the kind of effect that we like for new cards for the lunatic deck. Because they don’t come up very often, lunatic cards are best when they create a very impactful and interesting turning point in the game that can lead to some fun story moments – something Moonbrain has in spades.

We’re still not sure if character swapping is something that’s suitable to make it into a final product, (due to the above constraints) but we’re fairly confident that this card has that potential.