Review of Rising Sun

Blurb from the publisher: 'Cherry blossoms fall.

Choose your path wisely, and your allies carefully. When the winter snow covers the land, will you be the one chosen to rule the land of the Rising Sun?'

What you get: Your USD 99,99 or equivalent will buy you Rising Sun, a 3 to 5 player asymmetrical, dudes-on-the-board, area control game of a hybrid American and European design that lasts around two hours and which is the basic component of the Rising Sun game line. The game came out in 2018 after one of the most successful boardgame kickstarters of all time, that amassed 4,2 million USD , and has been a nominee and winner of quite a few awards and distinctions. Its current position on BGG (top-60 at the writing of this review) also reflects its appeal.

In addition to the rulebook that can be also found on the publisher's website free of charge, the game contains the following: 58 highly detailed plastic miniatures (30 Bushi, 15 Shinto, 5 Daimyo, 8 Monster figures), 15 Shinto white bases, 5 Daimyo white bases, 15 Large Monster bases (3 per clan), 5 Huge Monster bases (one per clan), one Game Board, 5 Clan screens, 7 Shrine tiles, 10 Political Mandate tiles, 21 Core Season cards (7 per season), 5 Political/War tiles, 24 War Province tokens (8 per season), 15 Teapot Set Season cards (5 per season), 15 Horseman Set Season cards (5 per season), 15 Archway Set Season cards (5 per season), 5 Alliance tokens, 20 Stronghold tokens, 20 Ronin tokens, 8 War Number tokens, 65 plastic coins, and 10 Clan markers (2 per clan).

Those who have already played (or read the review of) Blood Rage will notice many similarities (and some enormous differences) between the two games. They are both made by the same designer, the same artist, and the same company after all.

Gameplay: To rule Japan, you need to amass the most Victory Points. These are accumulated by capturing provinces during the game.

The fight for Japan takes place in one of its eight provinces, as well as four random shrines outside of the mortal realm. Each province offers a different bounty of coins, ronin, and victory points, or a combination thereof when it gets harvested. Each Clan has a different ability that breaks the rules. As an example, the Turtle Clan treats its Strongholds as one Force and can move them around as if they were figures, while the Lotus Clan places down any Political Mandate it picks and announces any Mandate it wishes. Each clan has a different starting region, a different starting honour, and a different seasonal income. The personnel they field is identical: the Bushi are the foot soldiers, the Shinto are spiritual warriors that can battle like Bushi and worship the Shrines of the Kami, while the Daimyo is a leader that cannot be taken hostage and cannot be killed automatically by a monster. The clans' sitting order is always the same. Honour is of utmost importance in the game. In case of ties, it is honour that usually declares the winner.

A game of Rising Sun is played through the course of three Seasons (plus a final Winter round). Each Season has five different phases.

Seasonal Setup is about preparing the map. A number of War Province tokens are randomly drawn and placed on the map, while the relevant War Number tokens are placed on the provinces. Then, all the Season's cards are placed face up next to the board. Each card is about a 'path', a 'way' or a trait of sorts, and provides an advantage. Players draw their seasonal income and return any hostages they might hold, something that grants them additional income.

The Tea Ceremony is the game's diplomatic phase, and one of the most important parts of the game. This is all about discussion and nothing else. The result of these discussions will be that players can be allied to one another. Only two players can be part of an alliance, not more. An alliance provides numerous benefits, like bonuses from the political mandates, no fighting between allies in the War Phase, etc.

During the Political phase players take turns selecting Political Mandates. The order is 3 Mandates, Kami, 2 Mandates, Kami, 2 Mandates, and one final Kami, before the War Phase Starts. The first Clan to pick a mandate at the beginning of the game is the one with the highest honour. In future seasons, it is the one next to the Clan that drew the last political mandate on the previous turn. The player draws the top four Political Mandate cards, looks at them, and chooses one. All players perform the mandate, one by one, starting from the player next to the player who chose it. In other words, a Clan performs last the Political Mandate it chose. There are five mandates: Recruit is about placing more figures on the board; Marshal is about moving figures around the map; Train allows the players to acquire new Season cards for their clans; Harvest is about filling your Clan's coffers; while Betray, the only mandate that befits the current player and not anybody else, allows a player to substitute other units on the board while breaking his alliance and losing honour. In addition to the standard action, the current player and his ally may do an additional action, usually similar to what the mandate is about. Examples include fielding additional figures, harvesting a province, buying a Seasonal card cheaper etc. A Kami turn sees the effects of each shrine resolved in order. The beneficiary of the effect is the Clan with the most Force in that shrine. There are seven shrines in the box (and four in any given game), each linked to a Japanese god. As an example, Tsukuyomi grants its worshipper an additional 2 coins, Susanoo grants Victory points, while Hachiman grants 2 Ronin tokens.

The War Phase sees the players battle for control of the provinces. War can only take place in the provinces that were marked during Seasonal Setup, nowhere else. Even more, the order these battles are fought is the one dictated by the Seasonal Setup. Obviously enough, no battle takes place if nobody is in the province, or only one player is there, or if two allied players are there. In this latter case, the player with the highest force wins the conflict. In case of a tie, the highest Honour wins as usual. A battle thus takes place if at least two non-allied players have forces in the province. Players first openly display their coins and Ronin tokens. Then, the players hide their coins and Ronin, and secretly and simultaneously allocate them to the different War Advantage spots on the War tile. Each war advantage is won by the player who puts the most money in it. There are four War Advantages: Seppuku kills all your troops but grants you VIPs and Honour; Taking Hostage may capture one figure from an ally or enemy, also stealing a VP in the process; Ronin can increase your army's strength; finally, Imperial Poets gains a player VPs for all figures killed during the battle. The battle is won by the player with the most forces in the Province, after counting out those who were taken away through Seppuku and Hostages, and counting in those who came through Ronin. The figures belonging to the players who lost the battle are immediately killed, unless the winning and the losing player are allies. All sides lose the money they used to power the war effort, in a peculiar twist however the winner has to provide reparations to the losers. Namely, the money that the winner spent, will be divided amongst the losers.

Seasonal Cleanup is an administrative face where players return all coins and tokens from their reserves to the common pile, the Shinto from the Shrines reunite with their clans, while the Political Mandates get shuffled back to the deck.

The start of the Winter Season signifies the end of the game. In this Season only Return Hostages takes place, before counting VPs. Winter Upgrades grant extra VPs depending on different Criteria, War Province tokens won provide different VPs depending on when they were collected, while players receive additional VPs depending on how many different provinces they won battles over.

The strong points: If you collect USD 4 million in a single kickstarter and you are still on the top-10 of the most successful boardgame kickstarters ever created, then you are probably doing something right.

CMON's boardgames have some of the best miniatures on the market, with Blood Rage being a prime example. The detail in Rising Sun is amazing, and did I mention how each clan has two different designs of Bushi even though they behave exactly the same? They are (once again, seeing how it also happen in Blood Rage) gorgeous. Extra care has been taken so that tokens do not get confused: your Daimyo and your Shinto will have additional bases, making instantly clear who is what no matter his design. This is particularly helpful to newer players who might be a bit overwhelmed by the scenery. Make no mistake however; this game is not about the scenery.

Rising Sun is very easy to learn, as easy as Blood Rage. The Clan sheets include everything you need to know about your clan. Make no mistake however, the game is not simple. This doesn't have to do with its mechanics; it has to do with human interaction and the availability of choice.

The game thrives through diplomacy, and in some ways it is a spiritual successor to games like Diplomacy or Machiavelli. You should be discussing at every single occasion, not only during the Tea Ceremony. Nothing is binding, and you can be screwed over by your ally. When you are not screwed over however, the bonuses add up, and the Seasonal cards can make a difference. Using, for example, a harvest while in an alliance, is immensely more powerful than doing it outside of one. In some cases it can come out as devastating. Alliances mean a lot, and don't mean much at the same time. It is not uncommon to use Betray, get out of the alliance, and then happily really yourself with your former ally in the next round, if you feel that is in your common interest. Taking a hostage here and screwing your ally in a minor way there is bound to happen in the standard course of the game, be it purposefully or through miscommunication. Don't hold grudges; you will not fare well. The objectives relate to you gathering VPs through any means possible, not making somebody else's life miserable.

The mechanics are clever. Just like Blood Rage, Rising Sun is about winning the war, not one single battle here and there. What matters is raking in the Victory Points, not Pyrrhic victories where 'you showed them'. Clever players will manage to get a bountiful of points after losing battles. The battle process itself is not necessarily winning the battle; it is about winning the most points in the present situation. Sometimes this means that you will need to spectacularly lose a battle, instead of just losing it. There are numerous obvious strategies: you need to win different battlegrounds in order to accumulate bonus points at the end of the game; you need to win more battles in autumn than you do in spring, since they have a higher valued. If you don't win battles, you'd better be winning VPs anyway, either through killing your troops or because you were clever enough to coopt into the death of everybody through the Imperial Poets. You need to approach all your battles within the context of the season they are fought into. The order in which they will be resolved speaks volumes of the tactics that each player will choose, and when they are likely to run out of money. You will need to treat some of your battles as stepping stones, and you will have to compromise and lose a few without winning much, in order to have the money to win the most points in the ones that really matter. This is the point where the Reparations mechanic (where the winner hands out the money he spent to the losers) receives a standing ovation. Handle this wrong by spending too much at the beginning, and you might screw up your whole plan for the season through giving your opponents money that they shouldn't have had.

It is not however only the Battle phase that deserves praise. The Political phase is equally strong, and a nice reminder of how you can only work within a certain context. The context is that you will only choose the action you wish to undertake only a handful of times during the whole game! The other times you will execute the action (with a fair amount of adjustments) that other players chose. This doesn't require only adaptability. It requires very fast thinking and projecting on what the others are going to do, so that you gain the maximum advantage. As an example, just by looking at the map you can project as to which Clan will need to move troops, and which will need to move them, for you to know whether your aspirations are served by their actions. Being in an alliance changes things even more, since you will be receiving added value from your chosen card... as will your ally. Incidentally, don't give the placement on the map more credit than it deserves. Control only matters in the harvest action and at no other point, thus positioning is a fleeting image. The speed in which troops can appear and disappear from the map is breathtaking.

Rising Sun has a very high replayability, with each game feeling unique. That is the result of drawing different War tiles as well as opting for different Mandates game after game. Some games will feel rich in resources and personnel, others will feel poor. In some games there will be stiff contests for land due to the same lands being drawn, while in others players will peacefully grab lands without much effort.

The production values are extremely high. All the miniatures are protected in custom made plastic inserts, some of which are inside carton boxes so that they do not move freely inside the box. The boxes have figures of how to place the figurines and which clan goes where. Not bad at all.

Rising Sun is extremely well-supported, with three expansions having come out for it already. We will examine them together shortly.

The weak points: The game's minis are bigger than they should have been; they will barely fit the map at times. As a result, the price stings. I don't necessarily consider Rising Sun to be an overproduced game, it is however a very expensive game for what it does. Shop around and buy immediately if you find it around the EUR 60 - 70 mark.

Each group must find its own way to regulate how dialogue and diplomacy work in the game, lest the game drag. You will invariably face AP issues and that's one thing; yet, don't let the players discuss ad nauseam without even having an idea of what they want to achieve. The game is chaotic by design, and I am not talking about the fact that you only choose a few of the moves that you will execute. The amount of permutations of what your actions lead you can make Rising Sun unbearable at times, without you feeling that you have much control over the results of what you are doing. With that in mind, don't fuel the indecision. If timed Tea Ceremonies work for you, go for that.

The game is heavily abstracted, no matter how well the theme has been pasted on it. This is no wargame experience. Literally, you win VPs by ordering your troops to kill themselves, you can take mythical monsters as hostages, and the winner of battles pays the losers.

The game desperately needs player aids. Each Clan sheet only shows what that faction can do, not the others; you have to continuously look at your opponent's Clan Sheet fronts for that. The monsters abilities can only be found on its Season card and nowhere else (not even the rulebook). This adds to the game's learning curve, and makes it overall slower even for experienced players. Expect to lose battles (and even the game) simply because you forgot a +1 that your opponent had on his Daimyo, or because of the second part of a Monster's ability. That should have been handled differently.

There is an issue with Honour and how easy it is to acquire it. If the Amaterasu Shrine is not in the game (if won, it allows the player to jump straight to the top of the Honour track), the player starting from the lowest Honour will face an extremely uphill battle. To its credit, the game suggests to play with Amaterasu if you are a first-time player. I am however not fully convinced about the advantages the game grants to the Clans with the lower Honour in order to balance things out. In many ways it makes their strategies kind of evident, and predictability is a bad thing on Rising Sun. I would need substantially more games without Amaterasu on the board for a more informed opinion.

The only time where players will choose the same number of Mandates is in a three-player game. In both four and five player games, the player who plays first will pick a Mandate one more time than anybody else. This does not feel right; in fact it feels unbalanced, and even more so because the game is a much more rewarding experience the more players are on the board. Keep on reading.

Those knowing the game's cards will have quite the advantage against experienced players. This might not be a problem in your first games since people will still feel out the game, if however your co-players change systematically, you will start seeing the side effects. That is not helped by the fact that there are devastating moves that can cripple a player from the very beginning, like a betrayal in the game's first round. This is not an impossible predicament to get out of, admittedly however, it is a terrible start and will require a lot of effort. The game could have been further worked on when it comes to these issues.

CMON repeated in Rising Sun the mistake it made on Blood Rage. The game's materials barely fit the box once it is initially opened and the game gets properly formatted. If you decide to sleeve the cards, these will no longer fit the box unless you start piling the elements of the game in the boxes that hold the miniatures. There is no space foreseen for any of the expansions, meaning that you will waste valuable space in your library by keeping pointless boxes, instead of keeping everything safely in the same box.

As soon as you buy the game, download and print the robust FAQ. There is a handful of situations that the rulebook should have handled better. If I were CMON, I would have dispersed with the FAQs. The Living Rules paradigm of GMT Games where the rulebook is amended every time it is needed, and a ruling can be found right next to a rule is much more convenient.

The game plays best with five people. There is a perceptible difference in the groups' dynamics with less players, the most obvious of which is that alliances can be longer lasting, even though one ally is benefiting at the expense of the other. Even though I would still play the game with three players, I do not recommend buying it primarily for this setup. To also state the obvious, if you don't enjoy games where diplomacy matters, if you get offended easily, or if you hold grudges, the game is unlikely to appeal to you.

If you have Blood Rage already, you might or might not want to purchase Rising Sun as well. The games are conceptually similar, no matter the theme. Yet, they are also very different. Rising Sun relies a lot on interpersonal relations, and for this reason comes out as a substantially more chaotic. Battle resolution is quaint; if you like control and predetermined results you will not like it. Yet, this is what the game is. For me, each game satisfies the same basic itch. Which game comes down to the table depends on how I feel on that moment and what players I have available.

Conclusion: Rising Sun is a solid game of the 4 / 3,5 variety, yet it loses that half point because it is clearly not for everybody. It plays chaotically, and requires players to analyse fast, decide even faster, and make alliances as soon as they can break them. That having been said, the game is focused, uses cool mechanics and gorgeous miniatures to achieve its goals. If you are in the niche that it targets, grab your katanas.

For more info on Rising Sun visit CMON at https://cmon.com.

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