Unplugged: GamerDad Holiday Guide 2025
Happy Holidays! After two decades of a GamerDad Unplugged Holiday Guide I think it’s finally time to say boardgaming has officially gone mainstream. There’s no better time to get (or get your friends and family) into the hobby than an extended holiday break. There are boardgames out there to meet up with almost any taste. Boardgames are timeless, just as good today as they will be years in the future, so a purchase today will still be serving you well into the future. As we at GamerDad have done for the past 20-odd years, it’s time for an annual rundown of recent boardgames well worth your time. Feel free to delve into some past year’s guides for 2024, 2023, 2022, or older as they’re still great candidates for your consideration. You might not find all these titles at your local mega-mart but many can be found online or in a friendly local game store. Some may argue $70+ boardgames (or more) are expensive, but compare that to video gaming (and where multiple copies are required for multiplayer play) and the economics of boardgaming shows their true value. For each game, I’ve provided the publisher (to help you find it), an approximate MSRP (you can probably find it lower), the number of players, the expected time for one game, and the manufacturer’s recommended ages. These age listings are often set for legal reasons and I would say most could easily be skewed lower for experienced younger gamers.
(Buy through this link and GamerDad gets a kickback…)
Many of you may be familiar with the Elder Scrolls line of role-playing videogames. The series sports games consistently found in lists of the best videogames of all time. Elder Scrolls: Arena appeared in 1994, Morrowind in 2002, Oblivion in 2006, and finally Skyrim in 2011. From Morrowind onward the games have been showered with mods, re-released and redeveloped, and it has almost become a meme to see if a particular platform can run Skyrim. With such a strong role-playing pedigree, creating a boardgame that might stand up to the series is no small task. Chip Theory Games, a company known for developing deep games using premium components have taken on the challenge and succeeded wildly. Granted, the game is not cheap (it retails over $200!) but what you get is a game that captures much of the feeling of building and growing a character in the videogame but now you get to do it together with friends while sitting around a table together! Like the videogames, Elder Scrolls: Betrayal of the Second Era can be played again and again, adventuring through multiple different provinces, pursue dozens of main quest stories, and (perhaps most importantly) construct and nurture player characters of almost innumerable variety. When one realizes the game can provide a group of 4 players with hundreds of hours of unique gameplay, one might claim the price averages out to be a bargain.
Our local high school has an enthusiastic mentor for its boardgaming club. Once a year, they put on an all-day boardgaming fundraiser, open to the community. As a parent and boardgame fan, I typically chip in and help out. This year, the fundraiser was for the back-to-school program that provides school supplies (and clothes, etc…) to needy students at the start of each school year. The event recommended a $10 donation to attend and sold snacks (chips, drinks, popcorn, pizza donated from a local place, etc…) to raise additional funds. Parents (like myself) could also donate used boardgames which were sold for additional funds. (I somehow managed to donate quite a few games from old reviews and didn’t go home with more than I brought…) The entire event was pretty low-key and since it was open to the public there were several families in attendance that were introduced to modern boardgames for the first time. For those not sure what to play, there were three tournaments over the course of the day, with small donated prizes from local businesses. While I only assisted with the game day, and didn’t run the whole thing, it really wasn’t too hard to pull off. If you have connections with your local school, I highly recommend giving a game-day fundraiser a try. It supports a good cause but also gives a great opportunity to introduce your community to the fun of modern boardgaming.
The WizKids line of role playing game miniatures is back. After releasing a set celebrating the past 50 years of Dungeons & Dragons, they have now just released a line featuring people and creatures from the popular Baldur’s Gate 3 videogame. Last summer saw the release of a 50th Anniversary set which is fun from a nostalgic collector’s standpoint, but I think the Baldur’s Gate 3 set is the best set I’ve seen in a long time. One of the drawbacks to randomly assorted miniatures is the need to create many different things in order to offer up something new in each box. This can result in opening up a box to find rather specialized miniatures that may be hard to casually work into a game. Both of these sets specialize in the common sorts of creatures one might find in an everyday game of D&D. A half-crystal elf from the far realm (I made that up, feel free to rip it off, Wizkids) may look really cool as a mini, but just how many times am I going to be able to work that into my adventure? With the Baldur’s Gate 3 release, most every box has something I know I’ll be using in the near future.
Before Harry Potter made middle-grade fantasy books “a thing”, there was a rich history of young adult fantasy books that were very middle-grade-adjacent. One of the standout series for me was the Dungeons and Dragons branded line of books in the Dragonlance setting. The initial trilogy follows a stereotypical fantasy gang of fighters, a thief, a healer, and a wizard as they go off to save the world from the machinations of the ultimate evil dragon god. Starting off as an inexperienced, eclectic group of semi-strangers, they bond together through six connected adventures becoming formidable heroes on their way to stopping the BBEG (big bad evil guy.) The first trilogy sold well and spawned many more novels in the same setting. Why am I mentioning it now? Well, the site Humble Bundle has a sale, 
Whether it is streamers, or pop culture icons (I suppose some are both) the role-playing hobby continues to make inroads to mainstream culture. Leading the pack is Dungeons and Dragons. With this week’s release of the new Monster Manual, D&D has just finished a refresh of their 2014 “5th Edition” ruleset. This new, “D&D 2024” edition is fully backwards compatible with the 2024 rules but has smoothed out some rough edges and attempts to provide a more helpful presentation of the material. In brief, the game has punched up the fun aspects for players, provided more concrete advice for new players, and souped up the monsters to provide more variety and more challenging monsters. While there is no dire need for anyone to change over from the 2014 rules (you can even run players running characters from each edition at the same time), new players should certainly start with the 2024 rules and hard-core players will probably see advantages in going with the new, adjusted rules.
Happy Holidays! Boardgaming continues to make inroads to wider audiences, and there’s no better time to get (or get your friends and family) into the hobby than an extended holiday break. There are boardgames out there to meet up with almost any taste.Boardgames are timeless, just as good today as they will be years in the future, so a purchase today will still be serving you well after the lockdowns go away. As we at GamerDad have done for the past 20-odd years, it’s time for an annual rundown of recent boardgames well worth your time. Feel free to delve into some past year’s guides for 
Do you like adventure games but your kids are a bit too young to be fighting dragons that poisons them and hinders their movement by 5 feet? The Quest Kids is a dungeon-crawling board game aimed squarely at that no-quite-yet reading level or above. Players search a dungeon, discarding the appropriate cards if they need to “scare off” a monster and collect its loot. Once the dungeon is cleared, the player with the most stars (from treasure and defeated monsters) wins the game. The Quest Kids is a pretty cool achievement for its age range, managing to bring in much of that dungeon-crawl fun without a heavy rules overhead. I happen to bring it up now as 
