Our 14th year of Board Game Gift Guides is here!
For each of the past 13 years, we’ve recommended around 40 games to get your friends and family as gifts.
We know that’s a lot to look through, so we’ve dialed it back a bit this year to 25 great games!
Below, you’ll find a few games in each of the following categories to get your juices flowing about what game gifts you can give this year.
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Over our 14 years of doing family board game reviews, we’ve played and reviewed a number of The Lord of the Rings games.
Today’s review is on the lighter side of The Lord of the Rings board and card games, The Lord of the Rings: Adventure to Mount Doom, by Kosmos.
Like a number of LOTR games, this game is a cooperative board game. Players work together to help Frodo and Sam get the ring to Mount Doom. They do so by rolling dice, reacting to cards, fighting Uruk-hai, dodging Nazgul, and overall maneuvering the Fellowship along the treacherous route.
While it’s a simpler LOTR game, we’ve still lost more times than we’ve won. Just begging us to play again.
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Happy Star Wars Day!
To celebrate, we’re diving into a review of another Star Wars family board game – Star Wars: Unlock!
That’s right, the very cool Unlock! escape-room series of games now has a Star Wars themed game – with 3 distinct game adventures. As far as escape-room games go, the Unlock! series have been our favorite. So I was super excited when Asmodee published a Star Wars version.
After having played through all 3 adventures, I’m happy to report that all of them are super fun to play.
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How well do you get along with the people living under your same roof? Do you know what makes them happy? And can you provide that?
Well, even if you can’t help out in that regard, you can at least try to make them happy with their decorating goals in a fun cooperative board game by Floodgate Games – Decorum!
Decorum is a cooperative, hidden information game where players try to decorate their shared home in a way that makes everyone happy. The catch is that you don’t know what’s going to make the other players happy!
You must deduce what types of things make them happy by what changes they make to the decorations in the various rooms during their turns. Hopefully you’ll all be able to figure that out and arrange things just so before the game ends or you’re not going to survive in the same house for long.
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We’ve played a lot of “escape room” board games and card games over the years. They’re full of riddles and puzzles to solve as you cooperatively try to get out of whatever predicament the story has you caught up in.
But rarely do these types of games include actual puzzles to put together!
However, that’s exactly the case with Exit: The Game + Puzzle – The Sacred Temple.
In this EXIT game by Kosmos, in addition to the riddles and challenges along the way, you’ll put together 4 actual puzzles!
Then you’ll look for more riddles/puzzles within those puzzles to progress further on your journey.
If you like puzzles within your puzzles, then read on…
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A true mark of a fantastic game is when your teenagers pull it out to play over and over.
And you know it’s an even bigger hit when they want to play it during dinner night after night.
Such has been the case with So Clover!
That’s also why it was such an easy decision to include it in our 2022 Board Game Gift Guide.
Repos Production has struck gold again with this super easy to play and fun cooperative party game.
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Thanksgiving Day is later this week in the US and we’re looking forward to gathering with extended family members. It’s a great time to celebrate the many things we’re thankful for – especially family.
And it also means party game time!
That’s because when we get together with family members we usually get in a few games as part of the fun. And the types of games we pull out for such occassions are typically the light, party games that can accommodate many players.
This year we’re for sure going to play an awesome new cooperative party game we got last month – Fun Facts!
It’s a new party game by Repos Productions that we’ve had a blast playing as a family and at the office.
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Two years ago we took off on a quest in space and now we’re searching the depths of the sea.
In fact, it was exactly 2 years ago, in March 2020, when we reviewed The Crew: Quest for Planet Nine by Kosmos. We played it a TON leading up to doing our review. And then we played it even more in the months after that while we were all shut inside as the Covid pandemic broke out around the world.
Needless to say, we absolutely loved the cooperative, trick-taking, mission-based card game. We could hardly get enough of it, even making up our own challenging mission scenarios.
Since then, Kosmos has gone ahead and outdone themselves with the follow-up game The Crew: Mission Deep Sea!
Yes, that’s right – they found a way to make a fantastic game even better. And I don’t think we’ll ever play the original again.
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Last week we shared about the cooperative story game, Stuffed Fables – where players are the stuffed animals helping a little girl.
Now that little girl has a baby brother with his own 2 “stuffies” – Pokey the unicorn and muscular Manny.
So it’s time for the stuffies to dive into even more adventures in Stuffed Fables: Oh, Brother!
While the game includes a new storybook, new tokens, sleep cards, and its own discovery deck, players still need components from the Stuffed Fables base game to play.
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Toy Story movies are still some of my favorite movies.
I love the idea of our toys having a purpose. And Pixar knows how to breath depth of character into them throughout their adventures.
Well, a few years ago, Plaid Hat Games brought that concept to life in a cooperative board game that’s fantastic for families called Stuffed Fables.
The game is a cooperative adventure game where the main characters are “stuffies” (stuffed animals) working together to save the child they love from a scheming, evil mastermind.
It’s also an “Adventure Book” game where the game board is actually a physical book teaming with adventures on every page.
And it works wonderfully!
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