If I keep saying the same thing it risks becoming a running joke, but even compared to People Power and The British Way, Vijayanagara offers an easy entry point to the formidable COIN Series. Designed by a quartet of designers — Cory Graham, Mathieu Johnson, Aman Matthews, and Saverio Spagnolie — this is the first in GMT Games’ Irregular Conflicts Series. The pitch is that this is not your ordinary COIN, with all the procedure and chrome the title implies. These are experiments, salvaging the system’s baseline concepts and taking them in a new direction.

I’m not so sure about that. Vijayanagara is about as COIN as they come. That doesn’t stop it from being a perfect gateway drug for an unsuspecting playmate. This one goes down smooth.

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