Egypt Old Kingdom
Turn based strategy, empire management. Build up your city, found your dynasty, pray to gods, open techs, place cards of workers to act out your will. Kill crocodiles and hippos, build houses, barracks, temples, plant flax fields and grain. Assimilate tribes.
The map view has two levels. One is your capital and neighbouring area, the other is the Nile-Egypt view. I played only little when that opened up finally.
Fairly repetitive and actions are restricted. Can just click away mindlessly, but have to pay attention to the resources to be actual successful, calculate with all the decimal numbers.
There is a story mode with timed events that matter a lot, and free build, where events more like flavors.
Gets a thumbs up from me for the theme, and they build upon the ancient Egyptian aesthetics for the controls. I really liked that they show the name of your capital in the upper left corner with the hieroglyphs: Inebu-hedj, White Wall - which were named Memphis by the Greeks. The devs also offer historical facts to read through, very educational.
It's an okay game.

Legal Crime popped on my radar last week. I played the demo over 9000 years ago, I found it on a demo cd of a pc mag. I loved it. It allowed some maps to play on unrestricted.
Not that much to do in the game. Extort businesses, convert them to illegal operations - Let's sell some boooooze! -, bribe the army, police, fbi, and politicians, recruit various thugs - Ready for the Cause! -, and do a drive by with a car packed with tommy gunners. Copito, Capo.
Most surprisingly it runs on Wine. And to my great surprise serials were given to the game to open the rest of the maps! Awesome. It was offered as abandonware, I dunno about the legality...
Next to it, a Russian version was offered, with the title: Capone. It is a full game, with Russian voices, and replaced pictures, and some textures. Too bad everything is Cyrillic. Although don't have to read too much in this game. Still I stick with the original.

Buzzed by the success with the previous game - success, I mean managed to run - I looked for another one with the same theme.

Gangsters: Organized Crime
This one also I only had as a demo. But contrary to Legal Crime, this was way more gimped, and only allow a couple of turns to play. So I was robbed from the joy of extorting businesses and building a criminal empire properly.
I got a version, but does not work. It's probably the Wine. The menu colors is fucked (its 256 color and it looks weird and text is unreadable), but the game starts properly and looks all right. Problem is it lags like hell. Have to Alt+F4 to close the window.
Robbed against.
Perhaps in a Win XP virtual machine it could work.

While I was looking for this I found something else.

City of Gangsters
This one really grabbed my attention, and played properly, actually spent hours on it on the weekend and even some during the week. Very good. Finally creating the mob that doesn't exists. Some of our income comes from unofficial poker nights, get it, Meadow?
Here you have a player character to start with, and a beater to run around do small businesses, selling a couple of jars of brick wine. First have to establish an illegal booze producing operation in a backroom of a legal business. Then create a front next to it, expand to neighbouring corners and extort all possible businesses. Meanwhile sell the produced alcohol, recruit more mobsters (only able to just a few), buy cars.
One important and original mechanic is the relation and favor system. Each character in the game has a network of relations - family, friends, acquaintances - and they can influence each other as your actions influence them. You sell booze to people they'll like you and owe you favors. You can use it to find new people who are willing to buy your product, who are willing to host fronts, offer missions, get you in touch with other people (simple business owners, thugs, police), teach you skills (such as how to produce more advanced booze), open more and new possibilities.
The game is turn, action, and movement point based. You move your mobsters around in cars, use AP-s for interactions and fights, and when you are done with all the people, finish the turn.
There are other gangs, the FBI and politicians. There are elections. I'm not far enough to know what's that about.
Your crew members have traits and they gain XP and level up. They need weapons to fight better, a variety is available from switchblade knives to tommy guns. A variety of vehicle is also offered. Everything can be bought or gained through missions.

Just read Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. Really dark book about Belgian expansion on African countries during the Scramble for Africa.

This book actually inspired most of the scenes and content from the movie "Apocalypse Now"

The Horror! line actually comes from this book.

Second topic of the day.
Hungary makes strategic partnership deal with Chad.

Back in 2023 November the Hungarian Parliament decided to send 200 troops (with 400 in rotation) to Chad, to do various tasks, advisory, support, battlefield monitoring, protecting Hungarian citizens and local Hungarian interest, supporting fight against terrorism. Main goal is to "reduce the pressure of illegal migration on Europe".
Since the US and Western Europe destabilized all the Muslim countries of the Mediterranean with the Arab Spring, most of those still can't plug the holes. Basically making the Sahel stable reduces the migration. For the same reason went our dear Ursula went to Egypt to talk to their dictator el-Sisi this year.
Here's article about it:
https://defence.hu/news/parliament-approves-sending-of-hungarian-military-mission-to-chad.html
And another one from 2024 April, using a French paper as a source:
https://fmso.tradoc.army.mil/2024/hungary-deepens-bilateral-ties-with-chad/
This also mentions that:
>Hungary has signed military, educational, health, agricultural, and energy memoranda of understanding with Chad.
And that in Chad Hungary substitutes Russia which is busy elsewhere, and this cooperation is very anti-EU.

News from yesterday: Chadian Prez Mahmat Déby visiting the country (I think it was mentioned last week this event will happen). Sunday evening Orbán hosted a dinner for him and had a nice chat. Our foreign minister Szíjjártó told stuff about the parternship:
https://abouthungary.hu/news-in-brief/fm-hungary-is-building-a-comprehensive-strategic-partnership-with-chad
So the parties signed:
- strategic cooperation,