Christmas is right around the corner and it’s time to see what your favourite Zatu bloggers are hoping is sitting under the twinkly fairy lights this year. Christmas for me is one of the only times of year where we protect time at home and get to spend time together as a family. A time where we stop living at a million miles a minute and take stock and just chill. That usually means more games, although with a toddler perhaps that is wishful thinking.
Regardless, I have asked Father Christmas for a couple of little square boxes of fun to be sitting under the tree for me. There is Agent Avenue on my wishlist, which is a swift two player battle of the “I split, you choose”. You are trying to chase down your opponent and catch them to win. Which I am absolutely psyched about. Hopefully the huge hints I have dropped have been heeded.
The other game that I am desperate to see under the tree is Sanctuary. This Ark Nova spin over is a quicker, more streamlined version of its bigger brother. I love Ark Nova and it is my most played game online this year. I just don’t have the time to get this big box onto our table all that often, but a shorter, quicker game will hit the table more I hope.
Lets dive into what our fellow bloggers are hoping to find on Christmas morning!
Luke Pickles
What do I want to find under my tree this year? Honestly, there hasn’t been a huge list for me this year. Not because there aren’t a lot of great games out there but because I struggle to find the time to play the ones I have as it is. Therefore my list this year has focused on expanding on the play experience of my collection.
Some people love a jigsaw puzzle, I love a Folded Space insert – in this case, I’ve gone for Windmill Valley and Tianxia, both games I’ve really enjoyed but come, as Board and Dice are want to do, in insertless boxes so you have piles of components thrown into baggies and a pain to set up.
Expansions are the other way I’m hoping to up my games next year, with the new Blooming Sails expansion for Windmill Valley (my game of 2024) and the new Unmatched Adventures featuring the Teenaged Mutant Ninja Turtles. I loved the cooperative challenge of the previous Unmatched Adventures, and having the nostalgia of these turtles bouncing around the battlefield is too good of an opportunity to miss out on.
Melissa King
Our gaming habits were turned upside down this year with the arrival of our fantastic little boy. Gone were the days of spending 4-5 hours with our family on a Saturday and Sunday afternoon playing D&D or trying out a few rounds of a new board game that one of us had just bought. 11 months in and whilst we are still trying to navigate the thrills and spills of a very mobile baby (early walkers are some fun, right?!), a more predictable routine and some hands-on grandparents mean we are slowly returning to the world of board games and all the joy that comes with immersing oneself in meeples, cards and dice.
One game in particular which has gone straight to the top of my Christmas wishlist is Vantage, by Jamey Stegmaier of Stonemaier games. Vantage caught my eye due to the fact it is an open world board game, without forcing you to play a continuous campaign. The fact we could play a game of Vantage, get the open world adventure feeling you get with D&D, complete the game and not have to worry about spending hours playing it or when we will get back to it again is perfect for our limited free time. I absolutely love the idea of all the players simultaneously exploring a planet, whilst being scattered across it, having limited ways to communicate, but all trying to work to achieve a shared goal. Hands up, our family is particularly poor at most co-operative games, but Vantage gives me hope that we could actually be successful at one without the usual raised voices and heated debates! Stonemaier is one of our favourite publishers, with my partner and I already owning Apiary, Between Two Castles, Pendulum, Stamp Swap and Wingspan. Fingers crossed I’ll be unwrapping another Stonemaier hit on Christmas Day!
Ian Paczek
I have trained my telescope on Christmas and just like Jocelyn Bell Burnell, I’ll be looking for signs of “Little Green Men”. Yes, I’ve asked for SETI – the board game of The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.
I have, of course, played SETI – that’s why I asked for it and am hoping to unwrap it. There is an interesting rondel mechanism which rotates the planets of the solar system with the inner planets completing their orbits more quickly than the outer planets. Thus, windows open up and a sort of gravity assist takes place. You can observe the cosmos with telescopes and you can send probes to the planets and moons of our solar system. And (spoiler alert): there are two alien boards which may get turned over and revealed.
You have a player board and a hand of cards. The player board is your tech tree – there are slots that can be filled by researching new technologies and this enhances your engine. Your hand is five cards and they can be used for one of various purposes – discarded as a free action for resources or movement; played for its main action; tucked for its income effect; or a previously played action card may have a mission that can be completed as free action once you meet its conditions. The flow of the game is to scan the skies, analyse the data, and launch probes into the cosmos to explore strange new worlds. Data is represented by frosty blue disks with 0s and 1s on them.
I’ll leave you with a physics joke – four physicists go into a bar and Fermi says “hey, where is everyone?”.
David Ireland
Maybe this will be the year I get Heroquest… and the opportunity to chop up some goblins, orcs and mummies??? What could be more satisfying this Christmas? Fingers crossed.
I’ve long wanted this one since it was rereleased as it was something owned as a child that mysteriously disappeared. My brothers and I had great fun, one player taking on the role of the evil Dungeon Master and controlling the forces of evil whilst the remaining siblings took the roles of the heroes, an elf, dwarf, wizard and barbarian.
We had great times carving each other up over these epic quests and it is a game that I would like to own again for introducing to my family one day, I cannot help but feel when my children are a little older they will get a real kick out playing this game, just as me and my brothers did way back in the 90’s.
This dungeon crawler game has many missions in the base game creating a different experience each time, then there are the expansions that bring both new heroes, new monsters and more missions to enhance the gameplay. Very much adding to the challenge of the game for all.
So come on Santa, please do this very old kid a favour and pop a set of Heroquest under the Christmas tree this year.
Dan Street-Phillips
2025 for me was the year of big boxes, I was focussed on games like Vantage and Galactic Cruise and so I have decided, mainly due to running out of room on my shelves, that 2026 is the year of the small box!
There are lots of small box games on my list but the one I have been looking forward to all year is 3 Chapters. A small, kind of, trick taking game that used card drafting in order to combo cards into scoring. Not only that but the theme and artwork is that of fairy tales and so if you manage to gain Dweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee then you will be onto points galore but Little Red Riding Hood and Cinderella may not get you as much. I love comboing cards. As a big fan of Fantasy Realms I really enjoy the thrill of drawing the card you need but also enjoy the lows of never finding it. I also love the idea of a trick taker where you keep your cards no matter who wins, akin to a deck builder instead! There is so much to love in this little card game and so here’s hoping my husband took the hints and it’s under the tree on Christmas Morning!
