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Hi everyone! 

As the holidays approach, I want to wish all of you Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and a joyous New Year! I hope that your holiday gifts include plenty of games you've been wanting and that you get time to play a few amidst your time with family and friends.

Here at GMT, our office and warehouse crew is pushing hard to get all of the Next War Korea and Next War Supplement #2 items shipped out to you before we shut down for the Christmas holiday. After that, we're going to have a slower week after Christmas, as several of our team are taking vacations, and we're trying to get everyone some days off to rest and enjoy the holidays.

Shortly after the 1st, though, we'll be ramping back up, with lots of games charging and shipping in January (see the Charging and Shipping section below for more details). As you'll note from the Production Queue section, below, we have a lot of games at the Printers or nearing that stage, so the first half of 2020 is going to be full of new game shipments.

As I look back at 2019, I'm really proud of the many great products that our teams have created together. But the emotion that I feel most deeply is not pride but, rather, thankfulness. I feel like I have the best job in the world, getting to work with so many smart, talented, and creative people across all of our many teams. It's a great blessing to be friends with the people I work with and to share a creative environment that is full of mentoring, mutual encouragement, and a lot of laughter. As I tell designers often (usually they cringe a little when they hear it), "Because we're all working together in this cooperative enterprise where we're sharing knowledge and skills and helping each other improve with each product we create, these games we create today are the worst games we're ever going to make together!" It's a bit of a weird way to look at it, I know, and I am really proud of the quality of games we're creating today. But I'm also most excited by the possibilities of what we can create in the future as we all learn, grow, and more and more become masters of our crafts together.

I'm thankful for so many of you continuing to support us, enjoying our games, and often helping spread the word about our games in the larger gaming community. I so appreciate your encouragement and support, without which our shared cooperative enterprise would never have survived to celebrate its 29th year in 2019!

I can't leave 2019 without noting with deep sadness that it was a year of loss for us as well, both among our design teams and our customers. I'll miss Richard Berg and Chad Jensen especially, two really great friends who left lasting legacies in our hobby. (We're working on some "tribute projects" for them next year, as well. We'll give you details as they're ready.) And I know many of us will miss that special friend and gaming partner, known— in a hobby sense—only to his or her gaming group, who passed this year as well. It's those great times around the game table with special friends that make this hobby so wonderful. Let's together raise a glass to those who've passed this year, with thankful hearts for the legacy of joy they left us.

As we wrap up 2019 with our final customer update and final batch of new P500 games, I invite your attention to the details in the sections below.

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Gift Certificates! I want to remind you that we do have GMT E-Mail Gift Certificates available on our website. They are available in denominations from $10 to $100. They're available year round, but if you'd like to e-mail a gaming friend or family member a nice Christmas surprise so they can choose their own game, visit the E-Mail Gift Certificate page on our website.

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Recent Designer Interviews. Maurice Fitzgerald from Moe's Game Table took the time to do video interviews with four of us at Harold's SD Historical Convention in November. Moe asked good questions about the hobby and our upcoming games, so those of you who are looking for more info on games coming soon from the four of us will likely find these interesting. Links to the interviews are below:

Interview with Mark Herman 
Interview with Volko Ruhnke
Interview with Morgane Guyon-Rety
Interview with Gene Billingsley

Also, the awesome guys at The Player's Aid published a couple of excellent print interviews recently.

Interview with All Bridges Burning designer VPJ Arponen

Interview with Ancient Civs of the Middle East team (designers Mark McLaughlin and Christopher Vorder Bruegge, and developer Fred Schachter

And for those of you who like podcasts, here are two really good recent interviews: