Vijayanagara: Deeper and More Informed Praise for This Game

This is adapted from the script of Episode 98, “ˆLight and Get Away, It’s the Fall Small Games Preview.”

I’m taking you back to medieval India for deeper thoughts on my initial take on Vijayanagara: The Deccan Empires of Medieval India 1290-1398 from GMT Games. Outside of obsessive Faraway play on BoardGameGeek, this is my heartthrob. I’m now at the tail end of two more parallel games on RallyTheTroops.com and have a better handle on why I find myself thinking about it day and night.

I ran across a helpful quote from Chris Farrell from the July 14 edition of his superb Substack newsletter, Illuminating Games. In the course of talking about Red Dust Rebellion, Jarrod Carmichael’s weighty futuristic entry into the couinterinsurgency, or COIN, system , he said this: “The defining feature of COIN is that you can never really get anything done. You’re at the mercy of the action deck for your activations, and actually taking a turn (which could be a trivial limited op) paralyzes you for the next card so you can never truly gain momentum. You can’t do anything complex or have much of a plan.”

Vijayanagara is built on a system called the Irregular Conflict Series, which is an offshoot of the COIN system, but everything he says here I find is also true of Vijayanagara. The forced cool-down of having your empire’s action counter stuck in the Ineligible box for what feels like decades is agonizing as you watch your eligible enemies disassemble your board position. Throw in the volatility of the events and you can quickly feel like you’re in a lifeboat with one oar, 10-foot swells coming at you from all directions.

Vijayanagara: Deccan Empires of Medieval India - In the latest of my series of matches against Michal and David, I’m playing as the Bahmani Kingdom (green) and find myself in an unusually fierce contest for the lower regions of the map.

But this is a feeling I’ve come to embrace as a beginning-level player of this game. A lot of it has to do with how my brain works: It takes me an immense amount of effort and repetition — and even conscious emotional regulation — to be responsible for an outcome in long, hard-fought games where there’s a clear and unforgiving line from the decisions you made to the end result. There’s a reason I don’t fuck with chess.

For me, in-game chaos that hides perfect knowledge and short-circuits perfect plans is like a jester that lifts the anxiety of analysis paralysis and pleasantly scumbles what would otherwise be a picture of incompetence and ineffectual play. It pleasantly confuses the killjoy in my head that tells me the poor job I did was the only story. 

As somebody who craves a mix of pure experience, exploration, surprise and the occasional win, the jester of fate shows me happy troughs in between the waves where I can make a satisfying and clever tactical move without seizing at the terror of being responsible for a Grand Scheme. As I reflect on a loss, I can savor ideas for improvement in digestible pieces because they sit alongside a comforting serving of “Well, there wasn’t shit I coulda done about that.”

Vijayanagara is giving it all to me right now: The spark of competition, the right level of detail and weight, an intriguing time and place, and the delight of a rambunctious story I’m only partially responsible for writing.

Other notes on what is making this so fun for me:

1. Getting to play it on Rally the Troops: My opponents in the two simultaneous virtual games are spread from Vancouver to Krakow to Perth. That’s a lot of time in between turns to study and savor the board. The deliberative pace helps me. I can ignore the first stab of disappointment at seeing one of my cherished regions overtaken by a neighbor who I thought I had under control and think about it a second time, a third. Put me at a table where that’s happening, I flounder and sink under the pressure, making unfocused and spastic moves. This mode of play is a perfect midpoint between merry skull-bashing and the contemplative.

2. I only knew about Timur, also known as Tamerlane, in relation to Eurocentric history. I think at one point the Pope or somebody sent an emissary to him because Rome thought the Mongols were Christians and might help them subdue the Levant for Jesus and loot? Now I’m looking up figures and cultures from all over Asia as their own galaxy with its own centers of gravity instead of as a distal chapter in the movement of European kings, which I think is one of the things the design team wanted to get boardgamers to think about.

3. I love how the game has historical acts that match the play, mimic the arc of history, and force an interesting finish for everybody: It’s great to be the Sultanate in the early game, when you can crush almost anything in your line of sight and the Mongols haven’t shown up yet. It’s great to be the breakaway Bahmani Kingdom in the middle game, when you can carve off fat servings of the Sultanate’s provinces as their grip starts to weaken and use your moneymaking ability to hassle the nascent Vijayanagara with cavalry strikes. In the late stage, enjoy being a Vijayanagaran Rajas who can vent north over the board, your slow-building strength manifesting right as your rivals have just about punched themselves out.

There’s a mix of experience levels in the two separate games I’m playing, but in each one, the game’s aggregate messiness somehow pushes the cluster of victory point markers close enough to each other at the finish so that even a faction that got ground into the dirt three turns ago can tip the scales or even seize the win before the final Mongol assault on Delhi closes the whole thing out. As to whether this forgiving bit of slack is built into the design as a leveling device or a function of my two groups’ general experience or playstyle, I’m not certain.

4. I love the asymmetry, both in how it models its setting and incentivizes each of the sides in this 100-plus-year push and pull. After two plays as the mighty Sultanate, I tried commanding the Bahmani Kingdom. It was a delicious new vantage point that required new thinking; I wasn’t a guy who could throw tens of thousands of troops around the board anymore in between feeding bits of meat to the hunting falcon on my wrist.

I had to learn the nuances of the Deccan Influence track, a specialized part of the challenger kingdoms’ dashboards that forces the Vijayanagara and Bahmani players to think about when and where they should take a break from playing cat-and-mouse with the Sultanate and instead chuck something mean and pointy over their neighbor’s fence. The Bahmani’s influence track has different motivations and rewards than Vijayanagara’s. With how much Rally the Troops lightens the mechanical burden, it’s easy to step into different roles and shortcut to thinking about the possibilities of what you can do instead of how you can do it.

I have a pledge on GMT’s website for the second printing of this game. I love everything thing about it and I want a physical copy so I can also play it solo whenever I like using the bot decision cards for NPKs — non-player kingdoms. This game found me at the right time and I intend to make countless circuits across its engaging and hotly contested green expanse.