For the Americans here – it’s Thanksgiving – a national holiday to give thanks that we’re not Canadian.  No, actually, it’s maybe to give thanks that we’re not British?  Though the original settlers who celebrated the first Thanksgiving still were British subjects at the time – so it’s probably not that either.

Though it’s still possibly “fake news”, the NY Times reported a few days ago about the origins of the holiday: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/21/us/thanksgiving-myths-fact-check.html

The Mayflower did bring the Pilgrims to North America from Plymouth, England, in 1620, and they disembarked at what is now Plymouth, Mass., where they set up a colony. In 1621, they celebrated a successful harvest with a three-day gathering that was attended by members of the Wattsalpoag tribe…

I’m guessing that in addition to showing the new colonists how to make popcorn, the locals showed them how to play Jet Set and Fistful of Penguins.

But seriously, the holiday is for giving thanks for family and friends, and taking the day off of work to see just how bad the Detroit Lions have become since the last time you actually cared enough to watch them on TV – which would have about one year ago exactly.

There will be plenty of food, pie, a period of resting on the couch (being put to sleep by the Cowboys) and then more pie.  The good news is, for many of us, the rest of the weekend is free, and this is the perfect opportunity to have all-day gaming to get more of those new Essen titles to the table!

For our blog, the Thanksgiving holiday also marks the date where we start to warm up our keyboards to begin our reviews of the new Essen games.  Traditionally, we have chosen to wait at least a month after the fair in order to give people enough time to play the games.  Many of us were at the fair, and we’ve been playing in our game rooms – but others did not get a chance to see the new games until come of the fall post-Essen conventions such as BGG.con, PAX Unplugged, Lobster Trap, Great Lakes Games, Essen West, Sasquatch, EuroQuest, etc. As you probably know, we like to have multiple opinions on games when possible, and in order to do that, we needed to give our writers a chance to play as many new games as possible!

Thus, starting next week, we’ll begin our series of reviews.  We’ve grown our ranks a bit in the past year, and this is a reminder to myself that I need to get around to updating the infrastructure here a bit… There are six or seven new contributors, and they’ll be helping us cover all the new games.

One other change to note is that with the influx of writers, we are going to increase the daily limit of posts.  We used to only have one post per day on the OG blog – and there were still plenty of days that went without something being posted.  But with all our planned reviews, we’re going to up the limit to two a day.

If you haven’t done so already, now would be a good time to Follow our blog – this will give you an email every time that a new piece is posted to the blog.  You can find the link to Follow in the right side of footer (at the bottom of every page).

Also, we’re now tweeting as well – follow us on Twitter: @opinionatedgmrs – you can also see some of our recent tweets in the right hand side bar as well

OK, gotta go make my grandmother-in-law’s famous stuffing.  I’ve been watching eight loaves of bread go stale for about a week – and it’s time to make all that into something awesomely yummy!

Until your next appointment

The Gaming Doctor