Rising Sun vs Ankh: Gods of Egypt: Which Should You Buy?

Rising Sun sells you feudal Japan, divine Kami, and monsters stomping across a map, but what you actually get is a tight area control game about money and timing. Players take turns pulling mandate cards (recruit, marshal, harvest, train, betray), the puller gets a little bonus, and everyone follows along. The heart of it is combat, and nobody rolls a thing. You can see exactly how many troops are in a contested province, then you secretly split your coins behind a screen across four advantages, reveal, and watch the math break hearts. My favorite part is that the battle winner hands their spent coins to the losers, so getting stomped often funds your next punch. It looks like a brawl and plays like chess with manners.

Ankh goes the other direction entirely. You're a god of ancient Egypt fighting for worship as the old pantheon fades, and there's almost no luck anywhere. No dice, no card draws deciding your fate, just simple actions that snowball into genuinely tough decisions, where one hex of placement can swing a whole battle. Reviewers keep reaching for the same word for it: chess. And then there's the twist. About two-thirds of the way in, the two lowest-scoring gods merge into one player. Pieces vanish, identities fuse, and somebody's carefully built plan gets ruthlessly gutted. Roughly half of players loathe this, and the other half call it the cleverest thing in the box. You need to know which half your table is before you buy.

Both games are rated medium-heavy for ages 14 and up, but honestly, neither one is scary to teach. Rising Sun's rules are surprisingly streamlined for how much the game is juggling, and it moves fast once people get the rhythm of the mandate cards. The real learning curve is social, not mechanical. New players need a game or two to understand that the coin bidding is where everything happens, and that an alliance is a tool, not a friendship.

Ankh might be even easier on the rules front, since the actions themselves are simple and the difficulty lives in the consequences. The one teaching landmine is the merge. If you spring it on people mid-game, someone's night gets soured, so say it out loud during the teach: two of you may become one god, and yes, a merged god can absolutely still win. Groups who treat their pieces as sacred will struggle with that no matter how well you explain it.

Table presence is a tie, and it's a glorious one. Rising Sun has Adrian Smith's stunning art and a pile of beautiful plastic, while Ankh looks like a museum exploded on your table. The honest catch with Rising Sun is that the miniatures barely matter to how you actually win, and the pricey monsters don't change much mechanically. Shut Up & Sit Down couldn't recommend it partly for that reason, calling the betrayal more an ambivalent divorce than a knife in the back. Where it earns its shelf space is the people. Alliances form, bend, and break in ways that keep the table talking, so with four or five sharp, social players it stays fresh for a long time. At three, someone always ends up the odd one out of the alliance dance.

Ankh's replay value comes from the positional puzzle and how differently each game can unfold, and it has one huge practical advantage: it plays great at two. That makes it the pick for couples and small groups by default, since Rising Sun doesn't even seat two. Flip side, at five players Ankh tips into chaos that's hard to plan around, which is exactly where Rising Sun starts singing. Funny how neatly they split the player counts between them.