Christmas Gift Guide – The 13 Best

This week we assembled the whole editorial team for our 2021 Christmas Gift Guide – with everyone picking a small handful of games that are excellent gifts AND currently actually available to buy!*

Below you’ll find links and a brief description of each game, but for more detailed explanations and recommendations, be sure to listen to the podcast episode that’s paired with this post – in which the whole team go through these individual choices. Thanks for reading and listening along, and do share the article or podcast if you think it’s a valuable resource for others this year. Much love from all of us – LET’S GO!
 

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10 Board Games to Buy the Enthusiast this Christmas

Quinns: I’m hoping that by now you’ve all seen Matt’s amazing video on big games to play with your family over Christmas. Didn’t he do a good job? And wasn’t it kind of hot seeing him dressed as a reindeer 30 seconds in?

But there’s simply no time to imagine stroking Matt’s downy fur, or his rock-hard antlers. Today I’m presenting our second (and final) holiday list feature: 10 strong gifts for the hobbyist board gamer in your life that you can actually buy.

That’s because a lot of the hottest games this year, like Root, Brass: Birmingham and Welcome To, sold out almost instantly. Not so with this list! We’ve made sure each of these titles is in stock to buy in North America and the UK.

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Our Shopping Guide to the Best Cheap Board Games!

Paul: Hot summer strawberries! It’s the middle of August, the sun is (sometimes) in the sky (here it’s mostly just windy) and this is the season that you finally get into board games. It’s an intimidating prospect: you’ve eyed those enormous boxes on the shelves with price tags that would make a banker blush, but this really doesn’t have to be a hobby that destroys your wallet.

Wait! What’s that noise? An approaching siren? An… ice cream van?! It’s me pedalling furiously toward you in the Shut Up & Sit Down Budget Bus, adding a host of surprising prices in this sequel to our indispensable article, How To Build an Amazing Board Game Collection for $10. GET ON BOARD.

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Our Holiday Gift Guide, 2017!

Quinns: Christmas is almost upon us, everyone! That sweet stretch of the calendar where board games take center stage, or at the very least share the stage with potatoes and Jesus Christ.

Are you thinking about buying a new game to play with your relatives? Or are you wondering which game to buy for the stalwart board game collector in your life?

Either way, we’ve got you covered with the below holiday game guide. Enjoy, everyone!

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RPG Review: Blades in the Dark

Quinns: Remember last month when we reviewed Tales from the Loop, the charming sci-fi RPG of bicycles, bottle rockets and 1980s theme songs? Today we’re going to look at the other new role-playing game that’s been turning heads among my friends, and we’re going as villainous as Tales from the Loop was innocent.

Blades in the Dark is a game by John Harper, who you might remember from Cynthia’s review of superb free RPG Lady Blackbird. But while that game was an improbable 15 pages, Blades is 336 pages. By comparison, it’s his opus.

Which is very good news if (like me) you’re a fan of Scott Lynch’s Locke Lamora books or the heist genre in general, because Blades is a game of playing regency-era criminals. Oh, yes. This is a scoundrel simulator, and whether you want to play a crew of classy vice dealers, some down-and-dirty brawlers, or even a worrisome cult is simply the first of one million entertaining decisions that you’ll be making.

Blades in the Dark also offers a vast, seductive backdrop to your escapades: The haunted city of Doskvol, which will be familiar to anyone who’s ever escaped into gloompunk videogames like Thief, Dishonored, Sunless Sea or Fallen London.

This is going to be a long review, and not just because this is a huge book. You see, not only is Blades the most fun that my friends and I have ever had playing an RPG, it’s also like nothing I’ve ever played.

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How to build an amazing board game collection for $10!

Quinns: Ladies, gentlemen, non-binary folks, and anyone else who’s left a comment over the last six years along the lines of “ARRRGH STOP MAKING ME SPEND MONEY.” Today, SU&SD amends for its capitalist crimes.

We talk a lot on this site about how we want board games to be “for everyone”, but to an awful lot of people the games we recommend are prohibitively expensive. That said, putting together an amazing board game collection can be cheap. Below, we’ve assembled a list of the very best games that could collectively cost you less than ten bucks, depending on your situation.

This isn’t some unsatisfying sampler platter. What lurks below is a moveable feast of some of the greatest games ever made. Were you to gather all of these games, I’d prefer your collection to ones I’ve seen costing $1000.

If you approve of this feature, please do share it far and wide! It represents a lot of work for both Team SU&SD and our donors, who we bothered about cheap games we might have missed (special thanks to subscribers Amanda and Jeff, who were especially great).

Let’s get started.

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SU&SD Take on The Board Game Geek Top 100: 10-1

How to Play Pandemic Legacy!

Paul: Gawd, I love BGG. It’s one of my favourite gaming places on the internet and this has been a fascinating journey.

Quinns: It’s an astonishingly rigorous database. As if IMDB was combined with a… an educated mosh pit, but with a set of scales in the corner that told you how much every actor weighed.

As we close out this feature, I’m simply left wanting to play more board games. Which is surely the best possible result.

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Feature: A Day in the Life of Matt’s Game Collection!

[Following on from our expedition into Quinns’ board game collection and the polite visit to Paul’s, it’s now Matt’s turn. Enjoy, everybody!]

Matt: Contrary to popular belief, I am not a man of infinite luxury. Paul has an entire cupboard just for games – Quintin has a cavernous loft to explore. Many have climbed that ladder and never been seen alive again, fading away to become a new addition to the dark and dusty collage of cardboard and bones. Basically those boys have space to play with. I however, have a shelf.

But it’s a big shelf! Oh my. There’s plenty of room in the rest of my flat, but my wife is a bit of a cheery dictator when it comes to interior design – so the sins of the husband must be tidied away. It’s occasionally annoying, but it does mean I get to live in a genuinely beautiful, tidy place? Swings and roundabouts, life is compromise.

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Feature: A Day in the Life of Quinns’ Game Collection!

Quinns: Ladies and gentlemen, roll up! It’s time for a new series where we take a look a team SU&SD’s board game collections. Come and see! Be amazed. Be aghast. Be envious. Comment with thought-provoking assertions like “why do you have that game it is bad”.

You guys will have seen my collection in the background of loads of SU&SD videos, but I don’t think you’ve seen the work that goes into it. Come with me today as I perform… a CULL.

But before that, let me show you my collection as it stands. It’s both completely ridiculous and not as ridiculous as you might think.

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How to Get Started with Roleplaying!

Artwork from Jason Morningstar's Night Witches

[Our header image is official art for Numenera.]

Hilary: So, you wanna play an RPG.

You’ve read the Shut Up & Sit Down reviews of Fiasco or The Burning Wheel. You’re daydreaming about a campaign of Apocalypse World. The idea of playing a baker in Ryuutama makes your heart melt.

You’ve bought the game, you’ve read the rules, you’ve gathered your friends, you’ve sharpened your pencils and now the magic happens. Well, uh, you assume this is where the magic happens. See, the rules didn’t necessarily explain how you were gonna “roleplay”. Just “then you play out the scene” or “make choices as your character” or “someone decides when the scene ends” or …hmm.

Hmmm.

It turns out there are spaces between the rules of any game left for you, the players, to fill in. Which is all well and good, but what if you have no idea what to do and you’re kinda worried maybe you’re gonna fuck this whole thing up and oh gosh maybe you’re not cool enough or nerdy enough or experienced enough or what if you forget which die is which or…

It’s okay! I’ve got you. Deep breaths. We’ve got this.

Sometimes magic just needs a helping hand.

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