Rally Point: How Rise of the White Sun makes a rich playground of China’s impossibly chaotic Warlord Era

After weeks of discovering new layers and playstyles, I have no idea how to summarise Rise of the White Sun, except perhaps “It’s 1920s China! Good luck!” Playable factions include major political blocs, conventional military behemoths, petty warlords, peasant uprisings, foreign stooges, and multiple communist cells (particularly in the recent DLC). There’s even a police chief, and my inevitable favourite, the angry mountain lady who cares for none of that, and only wants to raid everyone’s cattle.

This is an absurdly rich and complex grand strategy wargame. But where that usually means an unmanageable deposit, White Sun’s greatest design strength is fitting its possibilities into a framework where they feel comprehensible, and remain manageable at any scale.

For a start, you don’t have to manage your holdings. China is made of provinces, which are dotted with districts, which pay tax to their owner. Most factions will invest in these, building roads and telegraph lines, enacting socio-economic policies to improve their output. But these take time and resources, and districts are easily captured. Some factions are better served by seizing and neglecting them, accepting the low but easy income, indifferent to their opinion or recapture. Some actively terrorise and plunder, and many do all of the above.

Communists, meanwhile, can go for half the game with no territory, instead slowly winning over the exploited – even in districts they don’t control – by establishing underground organisations. Dozens of turns spent scratching out a few followers can suddenly blossom into a flow of militant supporters as your popularity tips over. And instead of giving the communists a special unit with +10 Number, White Sun lets them become a revolution because you recruited that greatest of heroes: a union man. Oh, he may run out of things to do, but he was that vital bridge from rural co-operation to organised self-defence against warlords, landlords, and Guomindang ally-rivals.

The union guy isn’t a unit either. Factions are in practice a collection of named (often historical) characters. Many are a solitary character’s perspective, though you may start with several, and more in the reserve pool – on your side, but without your control – and anyone can generate a new one for a price. Treachery becomes far more likely beyond 3 or 4, but it’s often tempting, because everything you do requires Qi (energy/action points), and each character gets 4 Qi per turn. Bigger teams can simply do more. Move an army, pay them, spy, contact an potential ally, placate the gentry, declare a soviet, purge the university, promote opium, reform education, pillage, PUNISH THE LANDLORDS, denounce the Fengtian Clique, pay bandits to leave. There’s an absurd number of possibilities.

That’s precisely why the Qi system works, and why large teams are unstable: demanding fewer decisions per turn makes them less overwhelming, less of a chore. Resources narrow your focus further. Each character acquires money, lackeys, and “face” through various means, which most actions deplete. Most also require the character to be in the relevant province, which combined with cross-province opinion penalties (and a northerner/southerner divide) puts a natural brake on expansion. Some are better at generating resources, leading naturally to dynamics like recruiting lackeys in Shaanxi and sending them to someone who’s prying communists out of Shanghai.

Because, you see, each character has a role dictating which actions are accessible. Officers can lead and manage armies, as can the relatively self-sufficient Warlord, but he’s worse at it and more corruptible. Statesmen are natural district administrators who accelerate ongoing projects (which, maddeningly, are obliterated if someone else claims the district). Spies can demoralise armies and gather intelligence on enemies. There are Theorists, Gentry, Bandits, and more, each potentially critical or useless in different circumstances.

Many characters have multiple roles, so a new Spy could come with Terrorist and Gangster, and some can bribe or even assassinate, or send another back to the reserves bench, or let the AI possess them. Most characters have traits, too. Seal of approval for the generic “British Agent” always having “cold-blooded”. It sounds like a lot. It’ll take a while to master, despite the help screens (excellently translated, even conveying light humour), but you don’t need to learn it all.

This is a remarkably friendly game that radiates knowledge and fascination with the era, and a desire to translate it into something approachable, yet still different to anything else. Bandits, for example, are not grind fodder or a punishment. They’re a natural consequence of circumstance, perennial in parts not because of some special banditry modifier, but because that district is a dump. The noblest administrator plain can’t spare the dozens of Qi needed to make a barren mountain marginally less destitute. Nurture its neighbours, though, and they’ll often form a militia, saving you the hassle.

Possibilities abound, but almost everything is easy to manage. Most districts can be understood at a glance, and require little supervision. The scale is huge, but your demands local: distant provinces are harder to win over, empires to keep track of, but that’s a governance issue intentionally simulated by the Qi system, rather than a design flaw. If you’re too stretched to defend that district, you were over-ambitious. If you didn’t even notice it was gone, you were probably being greedy.

There’s little to manage in combat too, few rules to memorise beyond the obvious: numbers good, morale good, loyalty good, training good. You’ll absorb the details as you go, with general considerations rather than nerdly calculations. Combat is instant, the mathematics invisible.

Tedious mega-wars of icon shuffling aren’t common either. Even having a worthwhile standing army requires qualified characters for multiple turns, and will still gradually dwindle through desertion (unless paid), or starve in poor areas, or potentially turn on you. Victory and movement often mean losses, and you’ll want guns, too. Making your own takes multiple slow stages of huge investment. Or you might tolerate smuggling to get hold of rifle shipments. A modern army needs machine guns and artillery, which means sacrificing exploitation rights to the imperial powers, for a chance to meet their arms dealers. And a chance that you’ll be denounced as a “running dog of the imperial powers”, causing half of China to align against you. As the Golog cavalry or Red Spears or CCP you could instead plunder hardware by ambushing in the steppe or amassing enough peasants to overwhelm. But it’s all difficult to sustain. Armies and campaigns tend to be limited, and quickly burn out.

It all naturally limits the warchore. Plus, as with Fragile Allegiance, there’s no formal peace/war status. You can just take Yan’an, and that’s that. There’s no need to count war points or grind through some AI’s arbitrary insistence that they’re not owned, actually. As a side effect, tiny forces can take from behemoths without guaranteeing annihilation, and lost districts can just be taken back. You can even seize districts from allies, or as I found out the fun way, find several independently switching to your side when you only meant to pass through. I’m not sure “It’s not my fault your people like me more” would have prevented the resulting feud, but I won’t be surprised if someone pops up in the comments to mention a historical moment where this really happened.

A major player like Zhang Zongchang might face more warfare, but that’s what impresses me most about Rise of the White Sun: you can choose the parts you enjoy. Though each scenario only gives dedicated story to a few key players, even the smallest get an introduction and goals suiting their situation. Some must prepare before the Japanese or Russians invade, or a bigshot returns. One has the interesting goal of propping up a rival as part of some wider international scheme. Some just want to govern their corner.

There’s nothing stopping you ignoring those and vying for influence in Shanghai instead of conquering Szechuan, or sneaking a raiding party to Beijing and crowning its leader Empress. I stood no chance of holding it, but it forced everyone in China to declare for or against before she went back home. But it’s best to play to them. White Sun is teeming with historical biographies, events, and nudges towards soft roleplaying. Sandbox modes offer full conquest options, but the specific goals and turn limits are clear: you’re meant to enjoy each game as a story for a day or two, not gruel through a long march.

It’s a scrappy game, fighting well above its weight, with modest but attractive presentation (especially the character portraits). You’ll need to forgive an inconsistent interface, and it’s esoteric in parts – I’ve yet to fully manage characters with positions in government – and there are minor display bugs. Finding people and factions is cumbersome. That compounds its big design shortcoming: the relevance of distant events is often unclear due to opaque relationships, and working in coalitions is particularly confusing. I got to the very end of one story before finding out who my own boss was, which admittedly is a quite funny way to demonstrate how alike bureaucracies tend to be regardless of political stripe.

For all its flavour, White Sun doesn’t produce intense vendettas or affections, which is a shame. But across multiple games, I’ve developed a sort of meta-rivalry or two, and a weird sympathy for some unlikely figures. It continues to surprise me, with one scenario including a format shift I’m not going to spoil. Grand strategy has many “what if” sandboxes, but few marry this much ambition to ease of play and joy of discovery. Fewer still do it with such contagious enthusiasm for an incredible era. Where else can you change history by fomenting a grassroots revolution and by suppressing one, by remaining neutral to wean your people off opium, challenging Zhou Enlai to an “ideological confrontation”, or going all Six Ages for the sheer love of raiding cattle?