First quarter reading 2025

 Another quarter goes by and it's not surprising that the reading list was shorter, allowing for all the medical activity following my trip to hospital.

Max Hastings - Vietnam

I mentioned this one after picking up a copy last November.  The subtitle calls it "an epic history of a tragic war" and that description is spot-on.  In more than 700 pages Hastings covers the causes and objectives of the war, from French colony, through communist insurgency to drive out the French, supported by Russia and China, partition and American intervention.  From beginning to end there seems no hope for the people of Vietnam, neither from the series of corrupt and unpopular governments in the south or the uncaring totalitarian state in the north. America spent a fortune in dollars and young lives but failed to prevent the communists taking over the whole country.  Nearly a million refugees fled the country, mostly in boats, to reach some chance of a better future anywhere else in the world.

As well as filling in the big picture with significant events that I was too young to understand when they happened, the book has individual stories of people who were there: patrols, ambushes, attacks on fortified positions, life on a SAM battery; this really is a huge book.  

Christopher Duffy  - Austerlitz

I had already read David Chandler's account of Napoleon's greatest victory and was hoping for  three-sentence summary of what he did that resulted in such an outcome. Both books gave me a blow-by-blow account of individual battalions and brigades slamming into each other in turn, all over the area of the battle.

After both accounts, all I can offer is this: Napoleon had an army that had camped and drilled together for two years, organised in fixed brigades and corps; the Russians and Austrians had no common language or experience of fighting together, and any organisation above the regiment consisted of ad hoc divisions and columns created on the day of battle.  The allies should not have rushed to battle against the French. but instead they advanced off a commanding position on the Pratzenberg heights to fight on the level ground of the valley below, only to find that the French then occupied the heights they had abandoned.  Individual units fought bravely in a piecemeal melee, but the outcome was inevitable.

Richard Osman - We Solve Murders

After 4 novels featuring the Thursday murder club, Richard Osman has moved on to a new set of characters for this story (although the old gang will be back).  The Thursday Murder club started as a believable group of retired people looking into a murder in their back yard.  As the series went on, the action became increasingly bonkers; having caught a local drug dealer, the gang may borrow a kilo of cocaine ro plant in someone's luggage, giving the police a reason to arrest the target.  The retired intelligence agent calls on foreign agents to help out and good turns to a wide range of shady characters lead to favours in return.  

This new story is bonkers from the start, with the main characters working for a close protection (bodyguard) agency. apart from the retired detective inspector who gets involved because he's family.

Like the other books, there are truly sad moments among the laughs. Also, the gang gets bigger as one good turn deserves another. An entertaining romp.

Paradice Worthing 2025

 On Saturday Trevor kindly took Lee and myself to Worthing leisure centre to enjoy a day of boardgame-related fun.  Paradice had  traders selling new and second-hand boardgames, a very civilised bring & Buy section (no crush, no arguments about who saw something first and reasonable prices).  I picked up Junta, a favourite of my university buddies, still in the shrinkwrap, for £23.  Trevor grabbed a small game for only £3).  

civilised gamers

There were game designers showing off their latest creations (just published) or looking for feedback on their games under development.

Hot off the press - first day on sale

The atmosphere was clearly different from wargaming events.  There was no pervasive odour of sweaty bodies. There were ladies present and even whole families.  Instead of a bacon or sausage sandwich to fortify  us for the day, there were granola bars. 

Where are all the bacon sarnies?

We took part in a couple of "social deduction" games.  Apparently, if you watch "The Traitors" on TV (I don't) you will know all about this.  The players (just under 20 in each game) are secretly assigned identities as good guys or bad guys by the Master of Ceremonies, who kept us on track.  Some of these identities provide little pieces of information about who the other players really are, such as how many bad guys there are.  One role may be a pathologist or undertaker who can find out (a bit late) whether someone who has just died was actually human or an alien or demon.  Another role may be able to sense how many of that player's two neighbours are bad guys.  In the two games we played there were as many different roles or identities as players.  The best known games of the genre are Werewolf and Mafia, well described on Wikipedia.

The game is played in daily cycles. During the daytime the players discuss information and clues to secret identities.  At night the good guys all close their eyes while the bad guys point to the player they would like to murder.  In the morning the good guys can open their eyes again, apart from the one who has been murdered.  Before night falls, the players can nominate someone to be ejected or executed as a bad guy.  The good guys win if they get rid of all the bad guys, and vice versa.

A snippet from The Spawn's identities

Our first game was The Spawn, set on a space ship.  I was an evil alien creature masquerading as human, but quickly established my cover story that I was the recycling robot.  Any scientific test would show that I was not human, but that's only to be expected, as a robot, and the real recycling robot is on the side of the good guys.  As the Psiok, I got to mess with Lee's post mortem examinations, and he spent the whole game wondering why the results made no sense.There were other twists, with one player sworn to protect me from ejection .  My cover remained intact until the evil aliens seized control of the ship from the surviving humans.  We won!

The next game was Blood on the Clocktower, a mediaeval setting where one demon takes on a whole town with help from his evil minions. Lee soon got into trouble.  He told us all that he was the town cook, which gives him information about how many minions of the demon there are (specifically 2 pairs sitting side-by-side).  We innocent townsfolk tried repeatedly to figure out which 2 couples this could be.  Eventually one of the others reasoned that it was impossible, and Lee could not be the cook.  Sure enough, they put it to the vote. Other votes were triggered when two players claimed the same identity.  They couldn't both be the butler, so one of them must be a bad guy - but which one?

With convincing logic, Lee was executed and turned out to have been the demon all along.  Nice try, but he was outwitted by a more experienced player.

To wind down, we borrowed Burgle Bros 2 from the games library and played out a cooperative heist caper to rob a casino.  My character was a safe-cracker, while Trevor had an acrobat with zipwires to move quickly between floors.  I spent most of the game just distracting the casino security guys by making a commotion among the slot machines before ducking back into a quiet corner that I'd found.  They came to the slot machines to check out the fuss, leaving Trevor free to work in the owner's office, then returned to their rounds, passing me by, so I could repeat the process.  Meanwhile Lee had made his way upstairs to find the safe.  We had fun, although we found the constant presence of security guys frustrating.

After an hour and a half of play, Lee got the safe open and we moved on to the ending.  There are several of these in a sealed envelope and we got the one with the car (avoiding the one with the tiger, or the one with the dye packs, which looked much more difficult to pull off).  Lee found a car in the vault, drove across the casino to pick up Trevor and myself, before crashing through an upstairs window to deliver us into the street outside.  It would have looked great in the movie.

Oceans 11 had nothing on us