Before tomorrow arrives with its food-coma-inducing extravagance and we all lose the ability to function for the last half of the day, I thought I would take the time to address what I am most thankful for. Well, ok, so its not what I am most thankful for, but its what I'm most thankful for that pertains to this blog: board games! Without further ado, here is 2 To 4 Players' Top 5 Board Games to Play on Thanksgiving.
With the close proximity to people you would normally avoid, everyone sticking their grubby fingers into the same dishes, and that weird uncle who you swear didn't wash his hands after using the restroom, germs are something that are spread during Thanksgiving as easily as Grandma's homemade apple butter. What better game to play than Pandemic, where you can at least pretend you are capable of staving off the inevitable sickness that occurs either from consuming too much turkey/gravy/wine or from Uncle Steve passing a little bit more than just the gravy boat.
Desserts are my favorite part of Thanksgiving. It's like we all have permission to blow our diets, wear our loosest pair of pants, and punch each other mercilessly to get the perfect slice of pie. In my household, everybody's dessert was fair game; if you weren't careful, others would swipe your dessert, leaving you deserted by your dessert. This sort of thieving, manipulative, backstabbeyness translates well into Munchkin, where you can betray and steal from your friends and family without actually causing them any physical harm, or worse, stealing the last piece of pumpkin pie.
There's all sorts of reasons for this one. After eating all that food, you'll feel like the living dead, or you'll feel like tonight could very well be your last night on Earth because you'll clog your arteries with the fat you sucked out of the gravy boat with a straw, or the metaphor that we are all a bunch of zombies the day after Thanksgiving, blindly following sales around like the undead looking for their next cranial snack. Take your pick.
What is the best thing to do after people eat an exorbitant amount of food? Play a game in which imaginary people eat an exorbitant amount of cardboard food, of course! Tokaido is a game about indulging in the good life, traveling, and of course sampling the best cuisine that money can buy. And the final kicker: the winner is the person who had the most fun on the trip. The game might as well be called Thanksaido.
Thanksgiving seems to be the time of year when the culinary Frankensteins come out the woodwork, seeing who can come up with the most freakish mish-mash of food and call it a dish. "I've got it! Let's take a duck, stuff it inside of a chicken, and then stuff that inside of a turkey! We'll call it a turducken! Or how about we stuff some bread crumbs and seasoning in the turkey's bum? We'll call it... um... stuffing!" Feed your inner Frankenstein by playing Smash Up instead, where you take two creatures and combine them into one fearsome fighting deck. Robots mixed with zombies? Rombies! Ninjas mixed with pirates? What are you talking about, ninjas and pirates don't mix. Come on.