The holiday season is almost upon us once again, and you know what that means. It’s a time when work schedules generally start to slack off a little bit in many places, and we tend to get some mandatory time off for Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Years Eve. Plus all those vacation days that you didn’t take are piling up, so it’s a good time to light up a fire and burn them.

For gamers, that makes this time of year perfect for getting in some extra hours with our favorite pastime, playing lots and lots of video games. I’ve already got my plans, which are a mix of some brand new titles that I am really looking forward to diving into full force, and some old friends that keep coming back into my rotation of gaming for various reasons. Any long time readers, or any of my six friends, will not be surprised by this list. Here is what I plan on playing over the next couple of months. Maybe you can use this as a good excuse to get your own list together. Whatever you end up playing, I hope you have a great time this holiday season.

Call of Duty: Vanguard

I was fortunate to be able to review the beta for Vanguard and genuinely enjoyed playing online for the first time in a long while. Now I have access to the full game (which I will be reviewing for GiN very soon) and will be spending more time than I care to admit playing it. I may have been playing a lot of shooters lately, but they have been more of the loot ‘n shoot variety, and will be nice to just focus on the shooting aspect. I’m also interested to see the main story unfolds and how long the single player campaign is, which is hopefully enough to burn at least some of those holiday hours in fast-paced shooting bliss.

Borderlands (All of them)

My wife wrote one of my recent columns and talked about playing couch co-op on Borderlands 2. She has now fallen in love with Borderlands across the board. She loves the writing, dirty jokes and all those random pop-culture references. What she doesn’t know (unless she actually reads this) is that I have bought her both Borderlands and Borderlands 3 for her birthday! I get the feeling we will be putting in a lot of long hours across the entire series. This doesn’t include all of the DLC we still have to work through. So this will happily take up a lot of holiday hours.

Football Manager 2017

This one is a given. Those of you who read my previous column know how much of a fan I am of management titles. Right now, for me anyway, Football Manager 2017 was the pinnacle of those management games. I might brave moving into the newer titles in this series, though I am a little worried that my amazing mojo with this game might not transfer to the later titles.

NHL Hockey

It’s hockey season, and sadly, the only way my Blue Jackets will ever beat former columnist Todd Hargosh’s Washington Capitals is in a video game. It’s actually nice to be able to own a hockey game since Nintendo deems them unworthy of their Switch console. The be a pro mode is solid and honestly, sometimes a sports game is great to unwind with after all of that looting and shooting. So I will probably be unwinding with NHL Hockey after unwinding with all those shooters. What a complex web we weave.

While there may be some surprise titles not on my plans (got to always keep an open mind), these are going to be the staples of the next two months of de-stressing and gaming as I actively waste as much time off work as I can. Besides, I have no doubts that the chief editor will slide games my way to review, and if they are a match three title then I might push back (probably not).

Looking at my list, I honestly would have wanted to put a few more games on there, but right now my Switch controllers are drifting too bad to play anything with them, and I don’t feel like paying Uncle Nintendo another $70 for another controller.

I’d love to see what games you all plan on playing this holiday season. Whatever they are, I hope you enjoy the experience and make the most of your extra holiday free time!