The Ultimate Last-Minute Holiday Board Game Gift Guide
Whether you’re buying for yourself or someone else, we need help with gifts. Let us lend a hand with this helpful board game gift guide!
It’s not always so easy to find new games to play. So hopefully this will provide some guidance toward improving your next game night!
1. Skulk Hollow
- 2 Players, Ages 8+
- Tactical combat
- Climb and attack giant guardians, à la Shadow of the Colossus.
Skulk Hollow is a game about taking down giant titans, or playing as one! Each player will be either one of the animal kingdoms or play as the raging guardians.
Each turn, players get a limited number of actions by playing cards from their hands. The Hero player will use their numerous forces to climb the guardian and attempt to break it apart piece, by piece. The guardian is attempting to satisfy a special win condition, which it will have to do before the heroes hack it to bits.
2. Villainous
- 2+ Players, Ages 10+
- Evil Strategy Game
- Meat your evil goals before the other villains to claim your title as baddest of them all.
I know, I’m recommending a Disney game and I can feel you pulling away from me. But hear me out. It’s the time of year when we’re all spending time with family and Villainous is the perfect game for that. Plus, it’s just a really fun, easy, silly game.
Each villain has their own unique set of goals and tasks and in each turn, you can try to complete your evil tasks, or sabotage the other villains in play with their movie’s protagonists. The game becomes a balancing act between moving towards your goals, getting rid of meddlesome good guys, and trying to piss off everybody else at the table just enough to give yourself the edge but not so much that they want to return the favor. Games don’t tend to last that long, but they do get hilariously competitive. And with Disney villains as the entry hook, almost everybody will have an easy time jumping in. Plus, there are Star Wars and Marvel versions, if Vader or Loki is more your baddie style.
3. Betrayal at House on the Hill
- 3 – 6 Players, Ages 12+
- Cooperative Horror Exploration Game
- Explore the haunted house until today’s monster comes out to play.
Betrayal is a surprisingly simple game with a simple premise; you and two to five friends are exploring a haunted house by pulling random “room” tiles out of the pile. Players build the map as they go and depending on the symbols in the rooms they land on they can collect items or have weird experiences. Standard haunted house stuff. But eventually, something will trigger “the haunt,” and that’s when the real fun starts. One of fifty possible monsters will begin their attack and it’s up to the explorers to win and escape the house or die.
This is my single favorite board game. It’s spooky in a way that’s fun and kitschy rather than genuinely scary, and the art matches the tone perfectly. And a randomly built house and fifty possible scenarios, it’s possible to play Betrayal again and again and again and never have the same game twice. Plus there are expansions, three editions of the game at this point, and Betrayal at Baldur’s Gate, the D&D-flavored spin-off.
4. Sleeping Gods
- 1 – 4 Players, Ages 14+
- Cooperative campaign adventure game
- Sailors work together to find lost totems in order to waken long lost gods.
Sleeping Gods does something other campaign-driven games don’t, it isn’t broken down into individual missions. The game is designed so that each session takes as long as the players want. When they are done, the game can be “saved” and picked up right where they left off. Because there are no missions, each turn drives them closer to their ultimate goal of finding the 14 totems scattered around the world.
The gameplay is mostly a worker placement style of game. Each turn, the active player places a sailor in one of the rooms aboard the ship and performs the action there. But along the way, players will have to tackle events and challenges where failure can mean wounding one of the sailors, damaging the ship, or worse.
5. Warp’s Edge
- 1 Player, Ages 10+
- Solitaire pool-building game
- Survive against the enemy space fleet without falling into a black hole
Solo games are great. But some “solo” games aren’t really that. They are typical multiplayer games with a solo mode tacked on, or you just play as 2 characters. That’s not Warp’s Edge. Warp’s Edge was designed to be a solo game from the start. It’s a quick and engaging game that also doesn’t fall into the “try to beat your previous score!” type of solo game either. This is a game you can win or lose.
Each game pits the player against a few smaller ships and one mothership. The player builds a pool of tokens by dropping them into a bag, then drawing a few at random. The tokens trigger firing lasers, evasive maneuvers, or resources for buying more tokens. It’s up to the player to build a balanced pool of tokens in order to fight their way through the fleet and on to victory!
Thanks for reading!
