If the territories, also selected at random, that are worth points in that round happen to be far from where the mafia crime games players’ pieces start the round, you may not have any fighting at all because it’s impractical or even impossible to get enough pieces into a disputed area. The number of War Provinces in each round is tied to the number of players, and thus limited when there are only three players going, but if you either made more provinces available for points or made their selection non-random, you would increase the probability of War in each round and make the game much more interesting with the smaller number of players.

Rising Sun has a more extensive rule set than what I’ve described here, so the learning curve for new players is likely to be steep; the rhythm of game play itself is easy to grasp, but you may lose time sorting out technicalities, especially as Season cards and Monsters enter play and increase the complexity of conflicts. It’s a smart, well-designed game, but it’s not to my personal tastes, given its length and the layered rules that kept us going back to the book repeatedly during each play. There’s a definite market for this kind of game—high interaction, including negotiations, with very little randomness anywhere in game play, along with very high quality components—but it’s somewhere at the top end of the tabletop market, which the game’s MSRP of $99.99 seems to support too.

For more information about Mafia City, please visit Yotta Games Studio.
Instant play mafia online now: https://mafiah5.yottagames.com/play/