Thanksgiving approaches, and with it, Black Friday! Games make great stocking stuffers and there are some obvious choices: minis and dice for your roleplaying fans, booster packs for those who enjoy collectible card games, and templates or strategy cards for your wargamer loved ones. Let’s take a deeper look at a few things that will raise your stocking-stuffers head-and-shoulders above the rest.
Dice Rings: sure, your gamer can never have enough dice, but what could be cooler than dice as jewelry? CritSuccess makes a whole line of neat little rings with spinners on them that can be used for all the standard dice including d100/percentiles, plus a 24-sided ring, alignment rings, attitude rings, and d6 rings with pips instead of numbers. Just stroke your finger across the spinny outer ring, listen to the soft whisper as the numbers whirl around, and see which result lands next to the pointer arrow. No more dice falling off the table or rolling under the couch. And if you step on your dice ring d4, it won’t mean a trip to the emergency room.
Cards for RPGs: Modern RPGs have a lot of mechanics and options. Keeping them all straight can be a challenge. Luckily, there are cards you can use at the table to help out. For Dungeons & Dragons there are spell cards, handy references for all the spells available to the spell-slinging characters in your party. Pathfinder has collections of cards for each of their campaigns which include portraits of important NPCs and items, as well as descriptions of the principle quests needed to complete the campaign. These can be a huge boon to groups that meet irregularly and need reminding of what they’d been up to.
For both games there are decks of cards that describe critical hits and critical fumbles. In case of an extremely good (or bad) roll of the dice, these cards can describe the epic win (or epic fail) that results.
An Entire Game: believe it or not, you can actually fit an entire game in a stocking, with room left for candy canes and gift cards. Even some RPGs! The core rules for Savage Worlds come in a small paperback that can easily fit in most stockings, as will games like Fiasco.
If you prefer board and card games, you’ve got a lot of options. For cat lovers there’s the Simon’s Cat card game. If you love to tell stories, check out the line of Gloom storytelling card games. HABA Games has travel-sized versions of a lot of their more popular games, and neat little mini-games like Catch Me that comes in a cute little tin.
As always, your local Dragon’s Lair Comics & Fantasy® is staffed with gaming and comics experts to help you find just the right gifts for the gamer, comic fan, and fantasy enthusiast in your life. Come by today to ensure that you’ll be able to get that perfect gift in time for the holidays.
