Rising Sun

The minis are the first thing anyone mentions and I’m not going to pretend I’m above that, the oni are genuinely huge, the clan miniatures have real presence on the table, and the box weighs what a small dictionary weighs. Eric Lang’s whole thing is auction-driven area control with a diplomacy layer bolted on, you’re bidding for turn order and mandates, forming and breaking alliances, and then resolving battles where honor matters as much as raw numbers.

Where it clicks is the alliance mechanic, because unlike a lot of area control games where “diplomacy” is just flavor text over pure math, here the alliance rewards are big enough that people actually negotiate in bad faith and then have to live with each other for four more rounds. I’ve had a session where sworn allies flipped on each other mid battle over a seppuku ritual card, which is a genuinely great table moment even if the rest of that particular game dragged. That’s my real hesitation with this one: the diplomacy angle can tip either into the best thing at the table or into something half-baked depending entirely on who’s sitting around it. With a group that won’t actually talk and scheme, it collapses into area control with expensive plastic on top.

A few things nag at me that most glowing reviews skip past. The clan powers are wildly asymmetric in a way that’s fun until you draft the wrong clan against experienced players and just get outscaled, and the setup genuinely is a beast, figuring out where every faction marker and season card goes the first few times eats real table time before anyone’s even bid on anything. I keep the reference cards close because the iconography for the mandates isn’t always self-explanatory at a glance, and this is a game where you’re squinting at four different card types simultaneously during the bidding phase.

Kingmaking shows up too, in three and four player games especially, somebody out of contention for the win can still decide who takes it, and that’s a real cost for a game this heavy. Still, when the politics actually happen, it’s one of the better area control designs CMON has put out, and the production makes every session feel like an occasion instead of just another euro on the table.