Playing games is a year-round hobby for some, but buying and exploring new games is also a great holiday tradition. And games are an everyday endeavor for fiction and hobby game writer James Lowder. Every year he joins us to share his Games to Gift list, which includes everything from two-player games, RPGs, and tabletop games.
So whether you’re just curious about getting into gaming or looking for a gift for the serious gamer in your life, chances are Lowder has a suggestion for you.
TOP PICK
ADVENTURE PARTY
Publisher: Smirk & Dagger; Designers: David Smith, Travis Winstead
3–8 players; 10 and up
Fifty years on from the creation of the role-playing game as an art form, Adventure Party offers a new way to gamify a common RPG mechanism: the 20-sided die roll. Players are archetypal characters in a classic sword-and-sorcery fantasy world, with some customized traits to make those characters their own. They take turns as GM (Guess Master) and read aloud a short dramatic hook. Then one player describes how they intend to meet the challenge using their character’s abilities and resources, secretly rolls their d20, and shares how their character actually fared in the encounter with the new description tailored to the number on the hidden die. A roll of 1 indicates a total failure, and 20 a stunning success. The real challenge comes in describing the encounter’s outcome in ways that reflect the difference between, say, a 12 and a 13. The GM and the other players guess the concealed die roll based on the tale they’ve been told, with experience points or individual glory rewarded according to each guess’s accuracy. A new player becomes GM, and someone else gets to roll and share their moment of triumph or tragedy in whatever epic or comic frame they want to set.
“There’s some really clever design in here because it gamifies both the dice roll and the idea of word choice and storytelling in ways that are amazingly clever,” says Lowder.
GATEWAY GAMES
Previously categorized as family games, Lowder notes that there is a heavy exploration of role-playing games from designers, publishers, and retailers, who have been examining what these games do, how they interact with audiences, and how they aim to expand to reach different markets.
“So what used to be called ‘family games’ is now more commonly being referred to as ‘gateway games,’ and that reflects the idea that you may be playing with your family and it may be an all-ages group based on family relationships, but really it’s about the level of experience with games and the level of commitment it takes to play,” he explains. “So gateway games are accessible games that play in a relatively limited amount of time and don’t require huge investment on the part of the player.”
LIFE IN RETERRA
Publisher: Hasbro/Avalon Hill; Designers: Eric M. Lang, Ken Gruhl
2–4 players; 10 and up
Life in Reterra sees players rebuilding a shattered world by laying tiles to create a community represented by a four-by-four grid with structures, inhabitants, and artifacts tallied for points once everyone has completed their individual layout. Turns are fast, with a complete game taking only about 30 minutes.
“The reason I just love this game is [designers Eric Lang and Ken Gruhl] pushed the boundaries of gateway toward hobby games by giving players choices about the conflict level for each session. You can play peaceful, coexisting parallel play around the table, or you can play a more cutthroat version of the game. They also encourage players to identify favorite building sets for use in the game for repeated play, and this moves folks at the table to engage with the design more actively, which is more like a hobby game. But they do so in a package that plays in under an hour and is accessible to people as young as 10, which is a really interesting melding of the two types of tabletop games,” he says.
Quick mentions:
- LANDMARKS
Publisher: Floodgate; Designers: Danilo Valente, Rodrigo Rego
2–10 players; 8 and up - CHARCUTERIE
Publisher: 3WS; Designers: Whitney Loraine, Josh Camden
2–6 players; 12 and up - ZIGGURAT
Publisher: MindWare; Designers: Matt Leacock, Rob Daviau
2–4 players; 8 and up
HOBBY GAMES
WYRMSPAN
Publisher: Stonemaier; Designer: Connie Vogelmann
1–5 players; 14 and up
"It has quite an all-star team working on it—it was designed by Connie Vogelmann, who designed Apiary, the sentient space bee game we covered last year, and it’s a reimplementation of our 2019 top pick, Wingspan," explains Lowder. "Instead of trying to attract birds to a sanctuary, players in Wyrmspan are excavating sanctuaries to attract dragons. Wyrmspan is a really notable creation in its own right, moving the base design deeper into hobby territory. Players juggle more tasks and have to more actively balance costs for actions, so there’s more going on here. Wingspan is terrific—if you’ve enjoyed that, you will enjoy Wyrmspan. But if you’re looking for a weightier hobby experience, this is a fantastic choice."
Quick mentions:
- WAR STORY: OCCUPIED FRANCE
Publisher: Osprey; Designers: Dave Neale, David Thompson
1–6 players; 14 and up - ROCK HARD: 1977
Publisher: Devir; Designer: Jackie Fox
2–5 players; 14 and up - ARCS
Publisher: Leder; Designer: Cole Wehrle
2–4 players; 14 and up
TWO-PLAYER GAMES
GHQ
Publisher: Mars International; Designer: Kurt Vonnegut
2 players; 9 and up
After the lackluster early financial performance of his first novel, Player Piano, Kurt Vonnegut gave board game design a try as a potential backup career. Throughout 1956, he developed the chess-like GHQ (or General Headquarters) and submitted it to publishers, who all passed on this game by the neophyte designer and struggling author. Rescued from the Vonnegut archives at Indiana University by game designer and developer Geoff Engelstein, GHQ finally saw print in 2024.
"This is a chess-like two-player game with an eight-by-eight grid where the players control four different types of military units. GHQ is ... in part inspired by Vonnegut's own military service, as detailed in Slaughterhouse-Five and some of his other works. But this is a really fast 30-minute chess-like play experience with a nice level of depth and replayability," notes Lowder. "...It's both a really interesting design with a fantastic lineage and an interesting archival example of what game design looks like."
Quick mentions:
- THE LORD OF THE RINGS: DUEL FOR MIDDLE-EARTH
Publisher: Repos Productions; Designers: Antoine Bauza, Bruno Cathala
2 players; 10 and up - CROSSBOWS & CATAPULTS: FORTRESS WAR
Publisher: Restoration; Designers: Stephen Baker, Noah Cohen, Rob Daviau, Justin D. Jacobson, Brian Neff
2 players; 10 and up
PARTY GAMES
SMUG OWLS
Publisher: Runaway Parade; Designers: Grace Kendall, Mike Belsole
3–15 players; 8 and up
“It’s a game where you use cards to randomly generate a riddle. Players then quickly offer a solution to the impromptu riddle, and the last player to come up with an answer serves as judge and awards points based on what the best, cleverest or funniest answer to the riddle would be,” explains Lowder.
Quick mentions:
- THIS GAME IS KILLER: ALIEN ON BOARD
Publisher: Smirk & Dagger; Designer: Ivan Turner
3–10 players; 10 and up - PHANTOM INK
Publisher: Resonym; Designers: Mary Flanagan, Max Seidman
4–8 players; 8 and up
ROLEPLAYING GAMES
DUNGEONS & DRAGONS: 2024 PLAYER’S HANDBOOK
Publisher: Wizards of the Coast; Designers: Makenzie de Armas, Jeremy Crawford, Christopher Perkins, Ben Petrisor, F. Wesley Schneider, Ray Winninger, James Wyatt
2–6 players; 13 and up
"It's not a new edition - it's a kind of a a slight update of the rules, but it continues to move for the game supporting diverse storytelling and actively courting a wider audience. In terms of game design it means shifting away from some of the limiting and dated mechanisms and fantasy tropes from the earliest stuff, but it's a really slick nicely produced new edition of the game so that's wonderful," says Lowder.
Quick mentions:
- FORGERY
Publisher: Game and a Curry; Designer: Banana Chan
1 player; 18 and up - THE DEVIL’S DANDY DOGS
Publisher: Monte Cook Games; Designer: Shanna Germain
2–6 players; 14 and up
