The frenzied holiday gift-shopping season is now in full swing, and board gamers across the globe are dusting off their Kallax shelves in preparation for the cardboard bounty that surely awaits them. It’s left to you, Friend of the Gamer, to make those dreams come true.
Whether your giftee is a longtime gamer or a brand new convert, Ars Cardboard is here with a list of games to please players of every stripe. We've broken your friends and family into tidy little categories and provided a main pick and some alternatives for each demographic. Our main picks focus on titles released in the last year or two, but we dug into some older titles for our expanded picks. To boot, most games on this list are friendly to tabletop newbies.
Where available, we’ve provided links to purchase the games on Amazon, and we've also included links to Boardgameprices.com, a site that lets you check stock and compare prices at a number of online stores. (Cool Stuff Inc. and Miniature Market are the two big ones, and we can vouch for them both.) Those online game stores generally have lower prices than Amazon, but you may end up with a better deal from Amazon if you’re a Prime member (true last-minute shoppers will want to go the Amazon route for the speedy shipping). If you’re able to get together a big enough order, both Cool Stuff Inc. and Miniature Market offer free shipping for orders totaling over $100.
Of course, if you’re lucky enough to have a real-life game store nearby, give them a visit. You might pay a bit more, but you’ll also get personalized recommendations and the warm feeling that comes from supporting a local business.
For the kids
Our pick: Loony Quest
2-5 players, 20-30 min, age 8+
$30 on Amazon, other options
Good kids' games can be enjoyed by adults playing alongside youngsters, while the very best pull double duty as great drunk-adult games. Loony Quest hits both marks. The game tasks players with drawing lines and circles and dots on video game-like mazes, avoiding obstacles and running over power ups on the way to the goal. The hitch is that you have to draw your line on a sheet of plastic sitting in front of you; only after you’re done do you place the sheet atop the obstacle course to see how well you did.
It’s a snap to teach, and it comes with seven full "worlds" of multiple levels each. A full game plays in about 20 minutes, and it’s a surprisingly raucous good time. Some of the power-ups let you mess with your opponents—one forces you to draw with your non-dominant hand—so make sure your kids won't get their feelings hurt if a little nastiness comes their way.
Other options: Karuba (age 8+, $30 on Amazon, other options) is a tile-laying puzzle game that's fun for the whole family. Camel Up (age 8+, $28 on Amazon, other options) is a crazy camel-racing betting game that supports up to eight players. Dr. Eureka (age 4+, $16 on Amazon, other options) shines as a crazy speed game about mixing chemicals in plastic test tubes. Older kids will be thrilled by the new Harry Potter Hogwarts Battle (age 7+, $45 on Amazon, other options), a deckbuilder that start super-simple and gets progressively more difficult and complex across the seven years featured in the book.
For the noob
Our pick: Potion Explosion
2-4 players, 30-60 minutes, age 8+
$36 on Amazon, other options
Sure, we could recommend stalwart "gateway games" like Catan, Ticket to Ride, or Carcassonne. But where's the fun in that? This year, we're recommending a newer game for board game neophytes—the excellent Potion Explosion. Potion Explosion is in some ways a board game version of those Bejeweled-style puzzle games that are all the rage on mobile devices, and it uses a component that's criminally underused in modern board gaming: the humble marble.
Players take on the role of novice alchemists plucking ingredients from a shelf in order to brew up fantastical potions. The "ingredients" here are colored marbles, and the "shelf" is a cardboard rack with five tracks where the marbles descend. Remove a single marble and the stack above rolls down; if your removal causes two marbles of the same color to collide, you get to take all contiguous marbles of that color as well. You fill up potion bottles that require certain combinations of colors, and when they're completed, you can drink the potions for special effects.
It's blaringly colorful and incredibly easy to teach, and the chain reaction combos you can set up are instantly familiar to anyone who has played a puzzle game on their phone. This is anything but a dumb match-3 knockoff brought to the physical space, though—it's a surprisingly thinky and satisfying experience that pretty much anyone can enjoy.
Other options: We'll take any opportunity to recommend the 2014 hit Splendor ($30 on Amazon, other options), a game where players collect chunky poker-chip gems in a race to buy cards. New York 1901 ($27 on Amazon, other options) is a gorgeous, family-friendly tile-laying game where players compete to build up the lower Manhattan skyline. Kingdom Builder ($20 on Amazon, other options), which won Germany's prestigious Spiel des Jahres award in 2012, can be taught in less than five minutes and gives player just one card per turn—but it also offers a modular board, different scoring cards for each game, and unique bonus tiles that add up to surprisingly deep strategy.
For the budding gamer
Our pick: Viticulture Essential Edition
1-6 players, 90 minutes, age 13+
$55 on Amazon, other options
Your friend has graduated from the University of Gateway Games and is now asking what comes next. Of the many options spread before the growing gamer, we recommend a lovely trip to wine country with Viticulture: Essential Edition.
Viticulture tasks players with running a successful vineyard; each player will construct buildings, entertain guests, plant vines, crush grapes, and fulfill wine orders, all in a race to make money and score victory points. The worker placement gameplay is a light step in complexity above beginner games like Lords of Waterdeep and Stone Age—which are also terrific in their own right—but it's simple enough that newer gamers should pick up the rules quickly.
The Essential Edition packs in several modules from the original release's excellent expansion Tuscany, and the newly released Tuscany: Essential Edition ($20 from several stores) brings most of the remaining modules over to the game. In particular, Tuscany's extended board ramps up the complexity and elevates the game to a whole new level. You can add and subtract the modules as you please, making the game perfect for someone who wants to slowly dive deeper into strategy games.
Other options: Isle of Skye ($28 on Amazon, other options) is probably somewhere between the "noob" and "growing gamer" categories, but however you categorize it, it's a terrific game. Marry the pastoral tile-laying of Carcassonne with a cool auction system and you have a good idea of what the game is all about. Roll for the Galaxy ($40 on Amazon, other options) is the absurdly addictive dice game version of the card game classic Race for the Galaxy, and we can't recommend it more highly. Five Tribes ($50 on Amazon, other options) is a fun, colorful game that kicks Mancala-style play into overdrive.
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