Rising Sun Is Gorgeous, Brutal, and One Bad Alliance Away From Deciding Your Fate for You

Backed this on kickstarter years ago mostly for the minis, I’ll be honest, and then it sat unpainted in the closet for a solid year before anyone actually taught it to me properly. Once it hit the table though it swallowed our whole game night. It’s negotiation and area control and blind bidding all stacked together, clans fighting over provinces, and every round you’re deciding who to trust with a coin bribe knowing full well they might turn around and stab you anyway.

Here’s the thing nobody warns you about going in. This game is extremely prone to kingmaking. One reviewer described exactly what happened at my table too, no one was intentionally doing it, but who a player chose to attack or throw their coins at ended up deciding the winner more than any actual strategy did. Another game just plain degenerated into king making once two players allied early and ran off with the advantage, and honestly by turn three you can watch it happening in real time and there’s nothing the leader can do to stop it.

Two player is a whole separate problem, there is no official variant, you flat out can’t play it with two, my table tried making up house rules and it just doesn’t work the way the real game does. People online recommend the BGG forum’s custom two-player rules or running double alliance clans, and I’d believe it, but out of the box, forget it, you need three minimum or the alliance system falls apart entirely.

Production wise this thing is stunning, easily the best table presence in my collection, but between the base pledge and the expansions I’m probably three hundred dollars in at this point, and per hour of play I’ve gotten my money’s worth several times over since it’s become our go to for a full game night. Still, the kingmaker problem keeps nagging at me every single play.

Four stars. Beautiful, tense, occasionally decided by somebody else’s grudge instead of your own plan.