Vijayanagara Review: Asymmetrical Medieval Indian Knife Fight in a Phone Booth | Ep. 95
What happens when you're the Delhi Sultanate trying to hold back two challenger empires and an incoming wall of Mongol cavalry? Your dreamy days of commissioning lavish minarets and creating fountains of cash from whichever tributary you squeeze are coming to an end.
Game of the Week (8:03)
#Vijayanagara: Deccan Empires of Medieval India from #GMTGames is tense, beautiful, and built on the Irregular Conflicts Series — a successor to the famed COIN system. The threats are numerous. The action selection mechanism is stingy. Your neighbors are hungry. The action is beautiful.
Drink of the Week (4:02)
Sam Adams Summer Ale briefly rouses the poet in me. Stella Artois and Hurradurra Reposado put him back to sleep.
Track of the Week (18:26)
Cool off your July with “Starlight,” the jazz-dusted collab from The Herbaliser and Roots Manuva from the Very Mercenary LP.
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Vijayanagara #BoardGameReview Highlights:
• Vijayanagara subjects you 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: Will you ride the turmoil or be engulfed by it?
• 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 and Game of Thrones 2nd Edition and Cyclades, when you 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.
• The implementation of the game on the RallyTheTroops platform 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.
#COINSeries #IrregularConflicts #Wargames #AsymmetricalGames #BoardGamePodcast #BreakupGamingSociety #RootsManuva #Herbaliser
