Vijayanagara: First Play in India’s Rough-and-Tumble 14th Century

This is adapted from the script of Episode 95: Vijayanagara Review or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bahmani.

So as it turns out, when you’re playing as the Sultanate in Vijayanagara: Deccan Empires of Medieval India 1290-1398 from GMT Games, your enemies, the Bahmani and the Vijayanagara kingdoms, will not sit and behave while you try to beat back Tamerlane and his Mongol horsemen, who show up a few times during the game to wreck your shit.

Vijayanagara Game 2: Did I learn my lesson from Game 1? Playing again as the Sultanate, I open by dispatching ruthless Governors far and wide.

The challenger Bhamani and Vijayanagara forces start out the game like small rashes you notice on your arm before you go to bed. Then the iron-fisted bastards who were running Delhi during the opening game give way to a new dynasty, the Rebel command becomes available, and you wake up covered in them.

By midgame, regions that were firmly loyal are answering to new Rajas and Amirs as they build their power bases, pushing north, turning your vassals into theirs, and hollowing out your tax base. Your dreamy days of commissioning lavish minarets and creating fountains of cash from whichever tributary you squeeze are coming to an end.

Vijayanagara is built on a game system called the Irregular Conflicts Series, which is in turn the child of an older system called the CounterInsurgency, or COIN, series. These game systems let you step into a given era of historical conflict and take the part of a major faction or nation in one of these struggles. The game arc can span decades or even centuries in an afternoon.

You will be subject to the major economic, cultural and military inflection points of the time: succession crises, invasions, new technology, and more reel off the event deck every turn: Can you ride the turmoil or be engulfed by it when, for example, the Diamond Mines of Golconda start kicking out loot or when a Sultanate army wanders off into the Hindu Kush Mountains and vanishes? Each of these let opportunists destabilize your position or vice versa.

The event cards, during which each of the three factions usually gets a chance to capitalize, kick off the excitingly stingy ration of actions, along with the opportunity cost anxiety of the game’s action selections: Each faction has its own powerful commands that it can activate to take territory or secure a sphere of influence on the beautiful map, but taking the most powerful options means you’re sitting out the next turn. Do you take a less powerful action in order to stay in the flow or accept the forced cooldown so you can make a bigger dent in the board? It’s not easy. While the Sultanate has a pretty firm grip up north, you share lots of borders with your hungry upstarts down south, and they’re gonna eat.

Plus, there’s the Mongols to think about: the Timurid empire was routinely stomping through northern India and I know they’re going to launch a big assault for the game finale. I have more than 200,000 troops in Delhi and I’m dying to head South into the Malwa District and stomp out the Bahmanis and tear down every brick of the annoying fort they built there, but I feel handcuffed because it’s the home stretch and Tamerlane could pull up on me any minute along with his many, many eager riders. 

GMT Games’ Vijayanagara: That’s an awful lot of Mongols you’ve got up there. Got something planned, Timur?

Unless I catch a lucky event, it would take me a whole turn to march down to Malwa, and another one to attack. I already spent a turn there executing some sassy Rajas and turning Malwa back into a tributary, but now they’ve booted out by governors in the Rajput kingdoms.

The array of forces in Vijayanagara are never clean. Pieces from multiple factions can co-comingle in a region for several turns, vibrating with menace and potential chaos. More than once I’d log on to take a turn and see that previously compliant regions had erupted into full-scale naughtiness and the game had a whole new face. Imagine a busy lunch spot with one of those big communal tables, except everybody at the table has a gun next to their plate and they’re staring you down while you try to read the menu.

The game is full of moments like this and they get brighter and bloodier down the home stretch: As I write this, the Vijayanagara have 10 victory points, and the Bahmani and my Sultanate are tied at 9. In one sense, I’m on pins and needles; on the other hand, I’m just happy to still be in it, even with my dynasty’s best days, by design, far behind it.

On a wider note: This experience is giving me a taste of those glorious “knife fight in a phone booth” nights I haven’t had since my last games of Chaos in the Old World, Game of Thrones 2nd Edition and Cyclades, when we made that first big leap from Risk’s modeling of “dudes on a map” to see just how deliciously fraught a territory control game could be. 

There are some things that solo play cannot duplicate: That feeling of peril and of people pushing against you, triggering three setbacks on any given day when you’ve got the resources to stop one. That sick feeling of watching yourself dip on the victory point track, seeing your opponents openly conspire to clip your wings, and realizing the best you can do is lash out because you wrong-footed yourself two turns ago. 

Because we’re playing online via RallyTheTroops.com and our players are in the U.S., Canada and Poland, it can be quite a bit of time between turns. But that’s OK, because being able to pop up the rules and reference cards from my RtT room and do some patient reading is a big plus.

The implementation of the game is lovely. The prompts and highlights the game feeds you on your turn, the game log that shows what just happened, all feels very tight and helps you quickly understand the “what” and “how” of executing a turn, even if strategy comes slowly. I highly recommend taking a look at the collection of games there.

So laurels for Rally the Troops and thanks to my patient opponents, Dave of Dude! Take Your Turn and Michal of The Boardgame Chronicles, who have been merrily carving off chunks of my Sultanate for 10+ days now. Best hazing ritual ever. I’m eager for the chance to apply what I’ve learned to a second try at running the Sultanate.

I also want the physical copy of this one because it plays solo, too,  but last I looked, the first printing was a hit and I saw one copy being offered for $300. GMT Games, the publisher, has their own in-house crowdfunding mechanism with its P500 series.

If 500 people pledge — at a price well below retail — it gets a second printing. Right now it’s just over 200, so if a couple of my listeners could just head over to the GMT website and pledge a few hundred copies, that would really speed things along, thanks.