Micro-Expansion: Danmaku!! Flowering Night

Hello everyone, thank you for your patience this month! I’ve got an extra special treat for you though, a micro-expansion! For Big Box, we’ve been toying with the idea of micro expansions. Each micro expansion would change the game in a major way, but in itself be relatively small. This setup forces each expansion to be highly efficient with its card budget, lackluster cards won’t do at all!

Today we are releasing Danmaku!! Flowering Night! This expansion contains just five cards, meant to be cycled fairly rapidly. In it you can buy a firework danmaku, a commencement shot, to start your turn in an extra flashy way! Each card in the series gets flashier and better though, so carefully consider your options!

Development of Flowering Night

When Carrot showed me this concept for a Charged Shot card, I basically went off. I decided I would design a Charged Shot micro expansion. I wanted several things:

1. Elegant methods to charge -  I really liked Carrot’s idea of forcing the charged shot first. You were charging while it wasn’t your turn in this implementation.
2. Avoiding runaway victor scenarios - I didn’t want a player who was ahead to be able to dump resources into a Spirit Bomb and one shot a player who was already behind. That’s negative net fun.
3. Players should reliably be able to charge - Having charged shots in the RNG heavy main and lunatic decks was out.

This is the initial pitch I made

The Charged Shot Trade Row

The CS trade row has 5 versions of the Charged Shot card. During your main step you can exchange points for CS cards like lunatic cards, but:

• You can only buy CS cards in ascending order
• You can buy multiple CS cards at once.
• The CS deck does not refresh until CS 5 (the strongest one) is bought

All Charged Shots have the base form of:

Action, Danmaku

Only play this card if you haven’t played a Danmaku card this turn. Choose a player in range and attack them. This ignores danmaku limits.

...and they get stronger as the cost goes up.

So players now can get at least 1 extra danmaku this round, but they have to think about if buying a charged shot or not is going to give the next players advantage

They can even buy extra charged shots, but they can still only use 1 per turn.

Mechanics wise, Flowering Night didn’t deviate much from this initial concept. I removed the increased damage effect and replaced it with deck manipulation for the first three cards, this allows you to possibly set up a combo, but isn’t inherently swingy. Cards 4 and 5 still allowed you to smash face by hitting twice, but they got to be more interesting than “graze or die.”

Something I’ve been pushing for Big Box is differently styled cards. In my pipe dreams I want all kinds of things: horror, art nouveau, 90s anime parody, and spy thriller. Anyone interested in Touhous in suits and catsuits?

Carrot was the one who suggested the charged shots be firework themed, each player gets a firework but they have to go in a loose order. The show must go on! Upon looking up old Japanese fireworks we found illustrated catalogues printed with wood block printing. Inspired, I made a concept rules card that mimicked the wood block style.

In the final, we ended up with a micro expansion of cards that mimic old wood block prints both in style and apparent age. We learned to add distressed textures to illustrations and how to make something digital look old and worn. We’re really excited about how it turned out, and hope you have as much fun playing Danmaku!! Flowering Night as we did making it!