Rising Sun

I bought Rising Sun off the back of Blood Rage and honestly expected more of the same, bigger minis, same bones. It isn’t. The combat here is a sealed-coin bid behind a little cardboard screen, you commit coins to a fight without knowing what anyone else put in, and losing hands you coins from the winner, which sets up the next round of bidding. That part is genuinely the best mechanism in the box, tense in a way dice never manage, and I found myself thinking three fights ahead just to time when I’d have the coin advantage.

Where it falls apart for me is honor. Start low on the honor track in a 5 or 6 player game and you’re functionally locked out of the war phase’s real upside, because building honor mostly happens through the fighting you can’t afford to enter, and once someone else climbs it you get bumped down. I watched a whole season evaporate for one player at my table who never recovered, no comeback lever, no mitigation, just watching. That’s not a hypothetical, it happened twice in four plays. Combine that with a negotiation layer that’s hardcoded into scoring but optional in practice, and you get a game that plays two very different ways depending on whether your table actually wants to talk.

The Puerto Rico-style action selection is the quiet MVP, forcing real tradeoffs on what you can do each season, and the alliance/mandate stuff, when people lean into it, produces the best table talk I’ve had from a strategy game all year. But three hours is a real number for this, not a box-lying number, and a fourth of that time goes to people negotiating in circles that don’t change outcomes. Eric Lang clearly can be trusted for a dudes-on-a-map design and this doesn’t disappoint on production or on the fights themselves. It just asks a lot of setup, teardown, and season-long patience for a payoff that isn’t guaranteed to land evenly across the table.