Rising Sun

Everybody backed this for the monster minis, myself included, they’re absurd, huge, gorgeous sculpts sitting in my display case doing basically nothing most games. Here’s the catch nobody tells you before you pledge, fielding them is very often the strategically weak play. The game quietly punishes you for wanting to use the thing you spent all that Kickstarter money on, which is a genuinely strange design tension I wasn’t braced for.

Underneath that, though, this is a real diplomacy game with teeth, alliances forming and breaking mid-session, betrayal that actually matters mechanically rather than just socially. I like it more than Blood Rage, the other Eric Lang design people always compare it against, because the shifting negotiation layer gives every session its own shape instead of just being another dudes-on-a-map draft.

Player count matters a lot here though. At three, two strong factions can quietly gang up, leaving whoever’s left picking last and stuck with the least honor for the whole game, which feels less like a strategic loss and more like getting mathematically excluded from turn one. And a six-player game with anyone new to it runs long, long enough that one group I read about never actually finished a full session. Four seems to be the number where this design actually sings.

Four stars. Play it at four, don’t feel bad benching the monsters, and go in knowing three-player has a real structural problem.