Well, the holiday season is upon us, and it’s time to start looking for gifts for loved ones (and assorted family members too). Gamers are notoriously hard to shop for because…. reasons. We’ve polled our writers here and we’ve come up with a few lists that might help you find some gifts for that special gamer in your life. With all these lists, we will use Amazon affiliate links (and if you buy things from clicking these links, we might make a commission that help us keep the proverbial lights on here)
You can check out our previous lists at: https://opinionatedgamers.com/category/holiday-gift-list/
You know, some days you just want to toot your own horn. We’ve got a bunch of talented gamers here on the blog, and here are some of the projects that we’ve been associated with… (All helpfully for sale and mostly available to get delivered by the holidays)… I tried to find at least one game from each OG writer that I could, but of course my memory is getting faulty these days, so my apologies to anyone I forgot along the way
Dominion – The first of the deckbuilding games, developed by Dale Yu and Valerie Putman –
Some thoughts about the game here
Blue Skies – Joe Huber’s game about getting control of airport gates in the era of Airport Deregulation
Mystic Paths – a new cooperative word game from Brian Leet and Kevin Worden (our review for this is coming soon!)
Ghost Fightin’ Treasure Hunters – This award winning game, the Kinderspiel des Jahres 2014 winner, designed by Brian Yu (who is the brother of our editor, Dale Yu) – is a great cooperative game that continues to challenge both gamers and families alike. Get in the house, rescue the treasure and get back out!
A review of the game here. As a footnote, this narrowly beat out a game desigened his brother, Flizz & Miez for the award. Flizz & Miez was never published in English – but it can be found on EBay – https://www.ebay.com/itm/133949545998?chn=ps&mkevt=1&mkcid=28
Roll for the Galaxy set – Designed in part by Wei-Hwa Huang – this is a dice adaptation of Race for the Galaxy, but it definitely has developed a following of its own and some people (myself included) prefer the dice version to the card original
Suburbia Collectors Edition – A huge collectors edition of this game, designed by Ted Alspach, developed by Dale Yu. Comes with all of the expansion, and lots of great bits!
Castles of Mad King Ludwig also has a collector’s edition, just out this fall!
Ted Alspach also has a number of other designs that you should check out – what about Werewords or the excellently developed Maglev Metro?
Gunkimono – A game by Jeff Allers – about controlling the battlefield in Feudal Japan (review here)
Hashi – another game by Jeff Allers – this one is a flip and write
Loot of Lima – a nicely produced deduction game from Larry Levy. You’ll burn thru your thinking caps with this one! https://amzn.to/31lOk4z
Dandelions and Psychic Pizza Deliverers Go to the Ghost Town Pre-Order
Keeping with the Boardgametables.com theme, there are Japanese games curated by our own James Nathan.
Dandelions is now available for purchase
Psychic Pizza Deliverers Go to The Ghost Town can be found here
Subdivision – a neighborhood building game from Lucas Hedgren (and developed by Dale Yu). Though Rahdo is not one of our reviewers, I should mention here that Rahdo has always ranked this one highly!
Body Party – a fun physical game by W. Eric Martin. It’s fun and zany, just what you’d expect from Cocktail Games… Not available in stores anymore – but it does come up on the BGG Marketplace occasionally… https://boardgamegeek.com/geekmarket/product/2716595
A Fistful of Penguins – a dice rolling game to collect animals, designed by Jonathan Franklin
Our designer diary was published here
Aviation Tycoon – A fight to be the best investor in the high stakes airline world – designed by Ted Cheatham
Battle Beyond Space – designed by Frank Branham – an epic space battle where you set the ships up, and then roll dice like crazy and try to blow everything up!
Snowblind – Race for the Pole – developed by Simmy Peerutin. Well this one is harder to get now as it’s out of print, but this arctic race game is available occasionally on Ebay
https://www.ebay.com/itm/363625638047?chn=ps&mkevt=1&mkcid=28
We reviewed it when it came out..
Hadara – A tight strategy game from a few years ago from Hans im Gluck… The English rules were translated by our own Patrick Korner.
A review from when it came out!
Chris Wray is self-publishing a set of trick taking games – you can get your own copy of February here on print-on-demand
One of our writers, Mandy, is one of the most fervent promoters of Japanese Kickstarters – you can follow her current projects here: https://trello.com/b/chBCUZkb/board-games-coming-soon-from-japan
And speaking of Japanese games, Rand is in the business of curating small boxes filled with Japanese games and other surprises that he sources from Japanese Game Fairs – updates posted here: https://twitter.com/2Ausser
And… not least, but definitely last (because somehow I forgot Erik in 2021, and now it’s tradition to have him be last!) – Erik Arneson published a book called “How to Host a Game Night” – https://amzn.to/3DmF24X
It is available in both electronic and dead tree form.
I heartily recommend Eric’s book (which I got to help out with) and Frank’s wonderful Battle Beyond Space (which I was a playtester for).
I’d also like to suggest two OOP Joe Huber games for your consideration – Scream Machine & Ice Cream – plus note that he has a really great prototype in the works.
Finally, Jeff Allers still has the best “I split/you choose” game out there – New York Slice aka Piece O’Cake.