Vijayanagara: The Deccan Empires of Medieval India, 1290-1398 from GMT Games is the first game in the new Irregular Conflicts Series. This new game is not a COIN Series game but it shares some of the same elements and its genesis was in a design contest held called Consim Game Jam where designers had to repurpose a COIN Series game and it’s components and make a new playable game in about 48 hours! The game that won the competition was Vijayanagara. The game is an asymmetric 1-3 player game depicting the epic, century-long rise and fall of medieval kingdoms in India over two dynastic periods.
Vijayanagara is very COIN like but with some new tricks that keep the game fast paced and interesting. We have now played the game 3 times and really love how it models the 3 unique factions with their own goals and abilities that have to fight each other, but also the 2 insurgent like factions of the Vijayanagara Empire and the Bahmani Kingdom must team up and work together somewhat to defeat the mighty Delhi Sultanate. The game plays in about 90 minutes and one of the coolest things about the design is that events are very powerful and when they are taken about half of them allow the player taking the event to remain eligible. This makes the game very interesting and fast paced with little to no downtime for any player.
-Grant
The Players' Aid 
I first encountered this game online a number of months back, if memory serves me correctly. I’ve seen different photographs of the board/map, some with more vibrant and rich colors than others, so as I sit here, tonight, I’m not sure what the final colors actually look like. Perhaps what you showed in the video is the final product.
The first time that I became aware of this game, and was looking at it on the GMT Games website, I remember remarking to myself that the map was beautiful.
One thing that I learned from watching this video is the Eligibility Order on the top of some of the cards. That struck me as a rather brilliant element of the game’s design.
The current pricing for this game on the GMT Games website is:
Regular Price: $86.00
P500 Price: $54.00
Due to lack of clarity for the unknowing, is the game in stock or out of stock (but taking preorders)? Maybe I’ll shoot GMT Games a message, and inquire of them.
Why they don’t put the following information right beneath the price, I’ll never know:
Status: Not there yet
Orders To Date: 145
I’ve been on GMT Games website many times in the past, but I don’t always remember where specific information is, which leaves me looking for it.
From the looks of it, they still need 355 more orders, before they’ll do the next print run of this game. Overall, I like the preorder system for new printings of a given game, but invariably, I’m ultimately left with no clue how long that it might take for them to reach 500 new orders for a game (they’re in the same boat, though). If I were to order it today, are we talking weeks, months, or years, until my order actually gets printed, published, and arrives? If one wants to play a game that they’re interested in sooner, rather than later, I always end up feeling as though opting for some other game is probably the better choice.
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