Rising Sun

Rising Sun is a game of strategy, negotiation, and warfare set in a mythological version of feudal Japan, where ancient gods have returned to reshape the empire. Designed by Eric M. Lang and published by CMON in 2018, it supports three to five players over roughly ninety to one hundred twenty minutes. Each player controls a clan with unique abilities, competing across three seasons to control provinces, recruit monsters, and earn victory points through a combination of territorial dominance, political maneuvering, and war.

The game arrived with enormous expectations and delivered a deeply polarizing experience. Community sentiment falls in a wide range. Players who connect with its negotiation-heavy, bluff-laden approach to combat rank it among their favorites. Those who expected a more traditional area control experience, or who bounced off its volatile swings and repetitive structure, view it as a gorgeous but frustrating design. Understanding where Rising Sun excels and where it stumbles is crucial before committing to the investment.

What Makes Rising Sun Click

The war phase is where Rising Sun separates itself from every other area control game on the market. Instead of rolling dice or comparing static values, players secretly distribute coins across four bid slots: Seppuku, Takeover, Hire Ronin, and Poet. Each slot resolves in order, and the highest bidder in each category gets its benefit. The result is a simultaneous guessing game layered on top of spatial strategy. Reading your opponents, bluffing with your coin distribution, and outmaneuvering someone who thought they had you figured out creates some of the tensest, most satisfying moments in modern board gaming. Experienced players describe the war phase as the game’s entire reason for existing, and it delivers.

Alliances drive player interaction to levels that few games can match. At the start of each season, players negotiate and form partnerships that provide shared benefits throughout the round. These alliances are binding but temporary, dissolving at the end of each season and forcing new negotiations. Betraying a partner, honoring a deal to build trust for later, or engineering a situation where your ally has to choose between their interests and yours generates enormous table talk. Rising Sun is loud in the best possible way, with every round producing heated discussions, shifting loyalties, and dramatic revelations.

Clan variety adds replayability through meaningfully different starting abilities. Each clan breaks the base rules in a specific way, and choosing your clan shapes your entire strategic approach. Some excel at combat, others at political maneuvering, and others at generating resources. The asymmetry isn’t as extreme as games built entirely around variable powers, but it’s enough to make each clan feel distinct and encourage different playstyles across sessions.

The Kami phase, where players bid on the favor of the gods through worship at shrines, provides another layer of decision-making. Choosing which shrines to prioritize and how much to invest in divine favor versus board presence creates interesting trade-offs that experienced players spend considerable time optimizing.

Rising Sun’s Rough Edges

Repetitive structure is the most common criticism. Each of the three seasons follows the same sequence of phases: Tea Ceremony for alliances, Political Phase for action selection, War Phase for conflict resolution. The actions available during the Political Phase are the same each season, which means players are performing similar loops three times in a row. The board state evolves, and decisions carry forward, but the mechanical rhythm can feel monotonous, particularly during the middle season when the novelty has worn off but the climactic final war hasn’t arrived.

Volatile swings punish new players harshly. Poor decisions in the first season can leave a player hobbled for the remaining two, with no realistic path to recovery. Because the game’s systems are deeply interconnected, a new player who misreads the alliance dynamics or misallocates coins during war can find themselves irrelevant before they’ve had a chance to learn. Rising Sun needs skilled players to reach its potential, and the learning curve to reach that skill floor is steeper than the accessible rules suggest.

The Honor track creates a specific balance concern that experienced groups learn to manage but new players struggle with. Honor determines tie-breaking and influences several game mechanics, and the methods for gaining or losing honor can create runaway advantages or crippling disadvantages depending on the shrine configuration and player choices. This isn’t a broken system, but it’s an opaque one that rewards players who have seen its effects in previous games.

At three players, the alliance system loses some of its punch. With five players, two pairs of allies and one unallied clan create a dynamic tension. At three, the math is simpler and the negotiation less interesting. Four and five players are clearly the stronger experience, which limits the game’s utility for smaller groups.

A Game That Rewards Its Veterans

Rising Sun’s central tension is the gap between what it looks like and what it actually is. The gorgeous miniatures, the sprawling map, and the feudal Japanese theme suggest a game about moving armies and conquering territory. In practice, Rising Sun is far more about reading people than reading the board. The war bidding system, the alliance negotiations, and the shrine competitions all reward social intelligence and metagame awareness over pure tactical optimization. Players who approach it as a traditional area control game will be frustrated by the randomness of outcomes. Players who embrace it as a negotiation game with a spatial component will find something special.

This means Rising Sun improves dramatically with repeat plays and a consistent group. A table of five experienced players, each familiar with every clan’s strengths and every war bid’s implications, produces a fundamentally different game than five newcomers navigating their first session.

Should You Play Rising Sun?

Rising Sun fits best with groups of four or five who love negotiation, bluffing, and social dynamics in their strategy games. If your table thrives on alliances, betrayals, and the kind of heated discussion that spills over into post-game analysis, this delivers an experience few designs can rival.

Skip it if you want a strategy game where the best tactical plan wins regardless of social dynamics, if you mostly play at three players, or if volatile swings and steep learning curves frustrate your group. Rising Sun asks for investment before it pays dividends, and it doesn’t apologize for that.

The Verdict on Rising Sun

Rising Sun is a bold, beautiful area control game that does its best work during its war phase, where the secret bidding system creates tense, strategic showdowns unlike anything else in the genre. The alliance and negotiation mechanics generate incredible table talk, and the variable clan powers keep each game feeling distinct. It’s held back by repetitive early rounds, volatile swings that punish new players, and a learning curve that demands multiple sessions before the strategy clicks. For a group willing to invest the time, Rising Sun rewards skilled play with some of the most dramatic and memorable moments area control has to offer.