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Arnaldo Amaral:
Ah, the ridiculousness of playing this! Honestly, I have had my hand crushed more times than I can count while playing this. Taco Cat Goat Cheese Pizza is an absolute blast and about as easy to learn as it gets. You get a deck of cards with (you guessed it) Tacos, Cats, Goats, Cheeses and Pizzas but you also get special cards: Groundhogs, Narwhals and Gorillas! This deck gets shuffled and divided among players. Taking turns, players flip over a card while saying in order “Taco”, “Cat”, “Goat”, “Cheese” or “Pizza”. You get it right? If at any point, the word matches the card flipped, every player must slap their hand on the flipped pile as quickly as possible. Last one grabs them all and then play is started up again! If a flipped card is one of the special cards, a special action must be done by all players before they slap their hand on the pile. It’s certainly manic but really, really fun!
The Mind is basically the opposite of the above. It’s more of a social experience than a game but it is so amazing how the concept works that it is simply brilliant. And it’s so, so simple! It’s a small box co-operative card game that takes around 20 minutes to play. In The Mind you have a deck of cards numbered from 1-100 and once deck is shuffled and all players are given a card each, all you have to do, without any signals and in complete silence, is to lay their cards face-up in order from low to high. That’s it! If successful, then you move to level 2 where each player is given two cards instead and this continues up to level 8, 10 or 12 depending on player count. Sounds easy right? Well it isn’t! But it’s really entertaining a great way to build connection with your fellow gamers.
I absolutely, utterly adore playing That’s Not a Hat! Every board gaming event and every meet up with friends I go, I bring this with me in my backpack. You’re given a deck of cards with everyday item illustrations on it. Placing it face up on the table, players take turns drawing a card and putting it besides them, so that everyone can see it. Once everyone has agreed what to call the items, the first player draws a second item from the deck, revealing it to everyone, and then flips it facedown and passes it along to the player on the side indicated on the back of the card. The receiving player then does the same with their face up item and so on until no items are faceup on the table. As items pass around, soon everyone will not be sure of where is what and gifts can be challenged and flipped over. Depending on the gifted matching, players get points during challenges and a new item is then added. Seeing your friends failing to remember something they were given 10 seconds ago is hilarious until it happens to you! Highly recommend this one too.
Luke Griffiths:
Christmas time is here. You’ve got £10 in your kitty for a purchase, maybe a Secret Santa gift, and you decide a great gift to give would be a game of some sort. Games are a tricky beast to buy for someone, their enjoyment is very much based on an individual’s taste. Do you go for something simple or complex? Would they like a game that can be played solo? Will they get enough people around the table for something needing 3+ players regularly enough to make it worthwhile?
As a result, I thought that I would suggest a gaming gift that one of my friends got super-duper hyped for. For a significant amount of time after receiving it, he was monologuing about how much he loved it and sharing, with great hilarity, about the enjoyment had by their family and friends playing. Adding to this, it is a simple game that everyone can play and enjoy! So, what is the game? Plop Trumps Extreme! Okay, so a game of Top Trumps is not going to provide much long-term entertainment for a hard-core gaming addict. However, for a friend that is likely to spend a Christmas enjoying drinks with a bunch of folks that find toilet humour hilarious they are nothing short of perfection.
Featuring a list of categories that includes Hardness, Smelliness and Yuk Factor; Plop Trumps will have people laughing, showing each other cards and exclaiming at the results. Which animal/s have the Smelliest poop? Which animal goes the most times per day and how does that relate to the hardness? For a simple gift that will certainly bring a smile to a dull winter’s day, you could do a lot worse than investing in a pack of Plop Trumps.
Emma Hunt:
Looking for the perfect gift for a family member or friend and don’t wanna break the bank? Well, look no further! Here are 3 gifts under £10 that would be amazing for the board game lovers in your life!
1. P for Pizza
A fun, fast paced word game which is great to play with a group of friends. You need to be the first person within the group to shout out a word that matches one of the category cards and starts with one of the letters displayed on the letter card. The winner of the round then takes the card and begins to build their cards up into a pizza slice. The first player to finish this wins the game!
The perfect gift for those people who love a good murder mystery. Echoes game requires you to download an app. You then scan the QR codes on the various different cards to piece the clues together and solve the crime. Reckon you and your mates are top detectives? Then this is the perfect game to purchase!
An awesome party game to play with a group of friends if you fancy a giggle. Become a mystic and perform a reading to the group based on the cards you have drawn. Will you be able to predict their futures?
Favouritefoe
Our stocking are getting ready to be hung – a few holes to darn and then they should be good to rock and roll! But what to put in them this year? There are so many mini games that it is hard to choose!
A fail-safe in our house is UNO FLIP. We are actually on our second set as we played the first so much that we decided to buy a second set to keep in the car. It’s UNO but better. Not that UNO classic is a bad game, but being able to flip reverse the deck as well as players’ chances of victory is a brilliant twist. It hasn’t lost its card shedding core, and those special action cards are still colour coated in take-that. But now you have a reason to eyeball the back of your opponents’ hands. If you can remember what shades they are holding, when a flip card is played, you’ll have some insider information in terms of what they might (or might not) be able to lay until the deck flips again! Shouting “FLIP” in a gleeful way is a must for us as everyone scrambles to flips their hands and their brains to focus on the opposite colours!
TUCANO by Helvetiq is another brilliant budget friendly stocking filler game for 2 -4 players that has a sweet and sour side! It’s part of a huge range of small box games from this publisher that shows no sign of stopping. A lovely mix of set collection, open drafting, memory, and take-that, you are picking juicy fruits and getting help or hindrance from some cheeky toucans!
Each fruit has a specific scoring criteria, and some are worth avoiding altogether. As the game goes along, toucans start to appear, and these feathered fiends can help you steal cards from opponents, give them away, or even hide then from other greedy gamers! And given that everybody can see the cards you are collecting, being able to bank them is handy indeed – not that you can add to concealed sets, but those points will be banked for end game. There are also some wild cards, and the art on all of them is cute and colourful. TUCANO is fun, fast, and fruity, and will offer a light relief after the heaviness of all those meaty main game courses over Christmas and at any time of year!
Dan Hilton:
Those of us that are in the board gaming hobby can often get caught up in the big, epic new releases. You know, the ones that require the equivalent of a mortgage downpayment and table space the size of a football field. But there are so many smaller games that can offer plenty of entertainment too. Saboteur is a game that scratches an itch that not many other games can. It merges simple tile laying with a hidden role mechanic that sees you trying to deduce who is on your team, and who is trying to sabotage the game. There is great meta gaming in play here too as the game is played over several rounds and roles are changed up each time. There are often plenty of finger pointing here that leads to a lot of laughs and plenty of fun for all. Saboteur is a game I always enjoy cracking out.
If a hidden mechanic isn’t for you but simple tile laying caught your attention then I can also highly recommend Bandido or it’s follow-up, Bandida. These are both cooperative games that sees you laying tiles down that depict paths in order to stop a criminal from escaping his (or hers if playing Bandida) prison. You need to lay paths down so they either hit dead ends or loop back into each other. It can be a tough game to succeed in but can often lead to that ‘just one more’ feeling as games can be quick and snappy. If cooperative gameplay is your jam, but tile laying isn’t your flavour, then Hanabi is another great option. It uses a unique mechanic where you need to hold your hand of cards so that you see the back of them and everyone else sees the face cards. You can see everyone else’s cards of course and between you all you need to successfully give each other minimalistic information about what cards you have in order to lay the coloured suites down in ascending order. It is a tough game (as most co-ops are) but it is a game that is unlike most others and makes for an interesting gaming experience.
And finally, if it is something a little more classic that you are looking for, then the perfect recommendation from me would be Boggle Classic. I may be a little biased (you know, being a writer and whatnot) but I love word forming games. And Boggle is the simplest form of such a game. You have a grid of dice that you shake up, each with a different series of letters written on their faces. Then flip the timer and write as many words as you can from the letters available. It may not be the most exciting game on offer, but it can still be a lot of fun for those who enjoy games that they need to think about.
All of these little games are super affordable and offer so much game for their price tag. They make for great little gifts, games to take the pub, play with friends or family and could easily fit snug in a stocking. They are all great additions to any gamer’s collection and you would easily catch me playing any of them
