Last night three of us - Ian, Chris, and myself - faced off across the board of Vijayanagara: The Deccan Empires of Medieval India 1290-1398. This is a GMT game but flies in the face of GMT's standard output in terms of accessibility and brevity: I taught it in 15 minutes and we finished in a shade over 2 hours.
The game is a fight for power across the provinces that all begin the game under the control of the Delhi Sultanate, played by Ian. Chris (Vijayanagara, yellow) and I (Bahmani, blue) are the upstart empires sensing weakness and looking to gain control for ourselves. Ian begins the game cash rich and in command of every province, meaning his victory marker currently sits at 18 compared to mine and Chris' zero. We're at peace, meaning all the provinces are tributaries, happily - or begrudgingly - deferring to the Sultanate's power and numerous troops. But we're scheming.
Ian doesn't just have the Vijayanagara and Bahmani to worry about though - from the north, Mongols periodically invade, making it as far as Delhi - Ian's capital - and generally getting in his shit.
It works like this: each round a card is flipped denoting turn order and offering an event. One by one we decide whether to take the event (a special action, for one player only) do a command & decree (two distinct actions, again for just one player) or a limited command/pass (limited action/get some cash). The catch is that command & decree and about half the events make you ineligible for the next round, essentially sacrificing a turn for jam now.
That's as complicated as it gets: the actions are largely get some dudes on the board, move them around, attack each other and - for Chris and I - rebel against the Sultanate's rule, wrestling a province from Ian's grasp. Doing so pushes our victory marker up the track, and drags his down. Other actions get you cash and cavalry, which are dead handy in combat.
Chris and I also have an influence track to ponder: you can feasibly stay at zero influence for the whole game, but increasing it not only makes certain commands and decrees more powerful, it also affects the victory point marker for the Vijayanagara / Bahmani. Influence entices us away from the unspoken - or often spoken - agreement to attack Ian: if we manage to knock each other out of a province, our influence goes up and the other empire's decreases.
Combat is simple too: attacker rolls four dice and defender two: each side does damage for rolls that match or are less-than units-present. So if you have six units, all your rolls will be hits! The aforementioned cavalry come into play here: used to 'charge' and decrease a die value by one, or 'screen' and remove an opponent's hit.
Essentially it's a game of shenanigans: more reactive and tactical than beholden to long-term strategising. Power ebbs and flows and there's a palpable bit of leader-bashing, although the Sultanate cannot attack the Vijayanagara and Bahmani empires unless they have rebelled in that province, meaning they have to march past 'obedient' smirking Amirs and Rajas to reach their more brazen co-conspirators.
The other empires start off focused on the Sultanate, but late-game are just as likely to be attacking each other, using special decrees like Conspire and Compel to engineer treachery amongst the ranks of their opponents. Which is handy for Delhi as the game-end is triggered by the Mongols launching a huge invasion on the capital, meaning the Sultanate player has a kind of pub-carpark finale where they can gain as many as three points - a big swing - or lose up to three, depending on how many Mongols remaining in Delhi after the battle. Ian had prepared well and managed to defeat them all, giving him the maximum points haul. But the abrupt ending had favoured me and I finished a point ahead of him!
Ian 10
Chris 7
We all liked this. It has an epic feel but moves at a reasonable clip, and I think familiarity would bring the play-time down further. The asymmetry is noticeable but not at Root-levels of density, and you sit out far fewer rounds than standard COIN games in the 'eligible' stakes. What's more it finishes early enough to play Little Tavern (Chris won) and So Clover (twice) where Ian's clover appeared to be solvable with a single card:
Thanks for the game last night. Vijayanagara certainly grew on me as the game progressed. As is typical with these kinds of game you spend an amount of turns exploring what your actions do and what the relative strengths and weaknesses are. The game really gets going once the trigger that allows us to rebel occurs. Then the really interesting three way struggle kicks in. As with most GMT games it felt really tight and balanced mechanically and you can tell its been extensively play tested. Little Tavern was fun too. I could see that going down well at the Corsham club :)
ReplyDeleteReally like the round-by-round vibe in Vijayanagara. It's not entirely devoid of strategy but more geared towards situational in-the-moment actions, which reminds me of Quantum a bit.
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