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Dec 13, 2024 By Austin Trunick

The 2024 holiday season is here, whether we’re ready for it or not. For those of us in the United States, where our Thanksgiving landed very late on the calendar this year, it feels like the gift-giving season snuck up on us entirely. To help relieve a little stress for those out who are still hunting for gift ideas (that’s most of us, right?), Under the Radar is unveiling our annual gift guide across several sections. Today, we’re looking at some of the best new releases in the world of tabletop gaming.

Know someone who prefers their gaming unplugged? A miniatures wargamer, or perhaps a roleplaying enthusiast? What about somebody who hosts a lot of social gatherings, and might be getting tired of busting out the same old party games? We’ve got gift suggestions for all of the above.

Stay tuned as we reveal our gift suggestions in home video, vinyl records, video games and more, and don’t forget that a gift subscription to Under the Radar is the gift that will keep that special someone hip to the best new Indie music all year long.

Games

Mutant Year Zero: Zone Wars (Free League)

RRP: $66.62 for core box, $66.62 for four-player expansion

If you’re on the hunt for a gift for someone looking to get into miniatures gaming — or a seasoned minis hobbyist who’d enjoy a fast, frantic, and fun skirmish game — then Zone Wars will have you covered. Set in the same engagingly bizarre post-apocalyptic universe as the Mutant Year Zero TTRPG (which we raved about in a previous gift guide) and video game, players will be pitting their squads of mutated animals, psychics, robots, and wasteland warriors against one another in a wild scramble to grab ancient artifacts and escape with their lives.

A game of Zone Wars is delightful chaos. It plays a lot like one of those online battle arena games, where your objectives are scattered randomly in the center of the map. As you rush for them, you’ll be drawing cards that trigger dangerous environmental effects — and if the hostile wasteland or acid rain don’t kill you first, you’ll be trading shots with your opponents, who are competing with you for the highest score. Setup is a breeze and full games play out in under two hours.

The core box comes with ten pre-washed (and very cool-looking) miniatures, dice, a large game mat, cardboard terrain, and all the cards and tokens you’ll need to play the game; the Robots & Psyonics expansion includes two more squads’ worth of minis, expanding the game to three- and four-player counts, for even more chaotic gameplay. Both boxes also include a set of five scenarios, for a more narrative-driven gaming session. There’s a lot in here to play with — and hopefully more add-ons to come in the future. (Buy the core set here, and the expansion box here.)

Our Brilliant Ruin (Studio Hermitage)

RRP: $49.99 for hardcover core rulebook

In tabletop roleplaying games, it’s rare nowadays to find a setting so enticing that it’s all the hook you need to get pulled in. Our Brilliant Ruin is set in an alternative version of the Gilded Age where the light from a distant star – “The Ruin,” as it’s come to be known – has reached Earth and begun to mutate people and animals, and transform man-made objects; animals have grown into monsters, and machinery now wanders the land seeming to have a mind of its own. What’s left of civilization is hiding out in a valley called Dramark; this surviving shred of society is controlled by several enormously wealthy, aristocratic families. They rule over a large working class, but also must contend with a rebellious faction who refuse to conform. Think of Downton Abbey or The Great Gatsby, but with vampires, ghouls, and sentient machinery. Aren’t you ready to dive in?

The world of Our Brilliant Media goes beyond just a TTRPG, and is a full-blown transmedia property. There’s also a 10-episode audio drama called Clawmoor Heights, a comic book series coming from Dark Horse, and three issues (so far) of an in-world zine called Whisper; all of this helps immerse players in Dramark, and familiarize them with the characters who live there. It’s all very exciting, and feels like the start of something big — making the lavish, hardcover Our Brilliant Ruin rulebook a perfect gift for the role player who wants something different than the typical fantasy or corporate IP-based settings. (Buy it here.)

SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (Czech Games Edition)

RRP: $69.95

SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence has been one of the buzziest board game releases of 2024, and it’s not difficult to see why. The game easily blankets any medium-sized tabletop and fills every nook of its cardboard play areas with planets to visit, satellites to shift about, and tokens galore. There are piles and piles of cards, numerous tracks up which to progress, and multiple areas to wrestle over for control; all of this is done with attractive and intuitive design choices. It’s an eye-catching game all around, but the star of the show — what everyone’s really going to be excited to play with — are the round areas in the center, which spin to represent the movement of objects through the galaxy and provides a shifting board landscape for the layers.

What sets SETI apart from other Euro-style games — and how it truly nails its theme — is what happens when you actually find extraterrestrial intelligence. Roughly midway through the game, players will make first contact with two alien races. These are chosen randomly from a stack of five alien types, and kept hidden until triggered. Once revealed, each alien introduces a new mechanic to SETI and sets up additional minigames in which the players will compete. Flipping over the aliens is always the most exciting moment in the game, as you can never fully prep for any certain one — leading to some tactical decision-making that you don’t find all that regularly in point-chasing Euro games.

If you know someone whose idea of a good time is gathering up a few friends to sit around a crunchy, two- to three-hour strategy game, you can’t go wrong with SETI. It’s also got a well-designed solo mode, allowing some extra flexibility for getting it to the table. (Buy it here.)

Skyrise (Roxley Games)

RRP: $65, or $95 for Collector’s Edition

Roxley Games, the publishers behind such all-time bangers as Brass: Birmingham and its cousin, Brass: Lancashire, and the handsome, easy-to-learn Santorini, now bring us Skyrise, an auction game that’s worthy of a spot on our shelf next to genre favorites like For Sale and The Estates. The game is set in a steampunk city in the clouds, and everything – from the board art to the cards – are stylishly designed. Each turn, players will choose a spot on the board to place a bidding token, and the auction will begin. After a player makes a high bid and all of their opponents pass, they’ll construct one of their buildings on that spot. Players will be trying complete objectives (both secret and public) for points, as well as collecting tokens that grant bonuses for achieving certain goals, so everyone at the table will value areas differently. This leads to interesting moments where, say, you might choose to open bidding on a spot all of your opponents want, spurring a bidding war and exhausting their resources so that you can collect your desired spaces at a discount. It’s a game that’s deceptively simple thanks to the way its various puzzles interlock so neatly.

Skyrise comes in several variants; they contain the exact same game, but come with different components. The Essentials Edition costs less, and comes with wooden tokens and a cardboard insert where the deluxe Collector’s Edition has 3D-printed miniatures and a molded tray. (The Collector’s Edition also has a few other upgrades, such as an embroidered bag, double-layered player boards and — most notably — three-dimensional island boards.) There’s also an ultra-fancy, Premium Collector’s Edition, with additional pieces and tinted miniatures. All three feature the same fantastic gameplay, so the copy you choose will boil down to whichever you think your giftee will prefer. (Buy it here.)

Blank Slate (The Op)

RRP: $25.99

Tired of charades? Telestrations? Cards Against Humanity? Blank Slate is a crowd-pleasing party game from The Op. In each round, a prompt will be drawn from a deck of cards: each contains a word and a blank space. (Examples: “Speed [BLANK]” or “[BLANK] Dog”) Each player has a small dry-erase board on which they’ll write a single word or syllable to fill in that blank. (i.e., “trap” or “bump” for speed, and “hot” or “hound” for dog.) Once everyone has finished writing, all players reveal their words and start looking for matches. If you match with only one other player, you both get three points; however, if three or more players came up with the same word, they only get one point each. (No matches at all? Well, that means no points, then.) The first player to reach 25 points is the winner.

Blank Slate can be taught in minutes, and comes with the materials for up to eight people to play once. It’s a fun puzzle — you’re doing your best to guess a word that only a few other people write down, but isn’t too obscure that you’re the only one who thought of it. That’s a tricky feat to pull off, but one that players of any age will have fun trying to tackle. (Buy it here.)

Dungeons & Dragons’ 2024 Player’s Handbook and Dungeon Master’s Guide (Wizards of the Coast)

RRP: $49.99 each

Fifty years ago, Dungeons & Dragons was born. It introduced the world to tabletop role-playing, allowing gamers to use a handful of dice, pencils and paper, and a set of basic rules to embark on fantastic adventures and come together for a unique, shared storytelling experience. As the game moves into its second half-century of existence, the hobby has grown more popular than ever. As new generations discover the game and use its tools to cook up their own heroes and tales, D&D continues to evolve. As such, the publishers of Dungeon & Dragons’ have taken the opportunity to release updated core rulebooks for the game’s current, Fifth edition, which has been running strong for more than a decade now.

If you’re looking to introduce a new player to the world of D&D, the Player’s Handbook has always been the best way to do so. This newly-revised is no exception. Its first thirty pages outline more or less everything a player needs to know in order to get started; the rest of this 380-page (!) tome is essentially a toy box they’ll be playing in for years to come. Hundreds of pages are dedicated to character creation alone and are full of fantastical species, classes, and abilities; other sections of the book pack robust descriptions of adventuring necessities like spells and weapons. There’s a reason most longtime D&D fans’ copies of the Player’s Handbook are well-worn and battered: it’s a book they’ve been hauling to game nights and flipping back and forth through for countless hours.

Similarly, the Dungeon Master’s Guide has been updated for Fifth Edition’s second decade, incorporating elements from releases that have come since it was last published and streamlining some of the rules. If you know someone who wants to start running their own D&D games for a group of friends, this is where they’ll want to begin. Like the Player’s Handbook, it’s handsomely illustrated and contains a quick-reference index in the back of the book, which makes these updated versions compatible with any modules previously released for this edition of Dungeons & Dragons. (Buy it here.)

Dungeon & Dragons’ Vecna: Eve of Ruin (Wizards of the Coast)

RRP: $59.95

The final adventure book to be released before the new rules update is this high-level campaign, which also acts as a culmination of the last decade’s worth of official D&D tales. It brings back one of D&D’s most infamous villains, the lich-turned-demigod Vecna, who is preparing a ritual that will spell dire consequences for not just the Forgotten Realms, but the entirety of the Dungeons & Dragons multiverse. To stop them, the heroes will have to embark on quests across many of the game’s most beloved settings, from Eberron to Ravenloft to Spelljammer, acquiring pieces of a powerful artifact that are held by an eclectic cast of adversaries and NPCs.

Designed specifically for characters at a minimum level of 11 and taking them all the way up to level 20, Vecna: Eve of Ruin is the biggest official release made explicitly for top-tier adventurers. That means its bestiary is stocked with beefy baddies with which to challenge heroes as they near the endgame, from the Astral Dreadnought — a stellar monster so large that its stomach is essentially a dimension in itself — to the Cadaver Collector, a creepy construct that wanders battlefields gathering the dead for its necromancer master. Vecna can be played straight up as presented, or easily cherry-picked for your homebrewed campaigns. If your DM needs inspiration for what to do when their heroes start to grow ridiculously powerful, Vecna: Eve of Ruin would be a really great place to start. (Buy it here.)

Dungeons & Dragons’ Quests from the Infinite Staircase (Wizards of the Coast)

RRP: $59.95

Quests from the Infinite Staircase is a journey through six famous modules from the early decades of D&D’s 50-year history. Each has been updated for 5E rules and fleshed out with modern production values and quality of life upgrades, giving new generations of players the chance to experience some of the best adventures from D&D’s past, and us old-timers out there the opportunity to go back to long-out-of-print favorites without having to re-learn any outdated rulesets.

Infinite Staircase offers flexibility in the ways a DM can run its adventures. One option is to play them all as a single campaign, with ample framework provided to link the stories through a central location (the titular staircase, which is lined with doors into alternate realms) and a recurring NPC. Or, you can run any or all of them individually as stand-alone adventures, or by weaving them into your homebrew campaigns. (The introduction to each module provides several suggestions for story hooks to kick off each tale, which is very helpful.) This is a really nice option for game groups with limited evenings open on the calendars, as you can play through a pretty satisfying story in just a few sessions, compared to having to map out months ahead of time to finish one of the larger campaign books.

Best of all, the modules in Infinite Staircase come in very different flavors — so there’s something in here that’ll strike anyone’s fancy. We were most excited by the Egyptian-themed dungeon crawl, Pharaoh, and the wild-looking Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, a science fiction-infused tale that has your stock fantasy heroes explore a crashed spaceship and face off against robots with laser guns. (Buy it here.)

Wonky (The Op)

RRP: $19.99

Wonky is an easy-to-teach little dexterity game that plays like a cross between Uno and a reverse form of Jenga. Players are dealt a hand of seven cards, which they’ll be racing to empty. Most of the cards feature a depiction of some assortment of colored blocks, which they’ll need to add to a tower of blocks in the middle of the table. If they’re successfully able to add their block(s) to the stack, they discard the card and the next player takes their turn. If the tower falls, however, they’ll need to draw three new cards to their hand.

That sounds simple enough, right? Well, there’s a trick to it, you see – the blocks themselves are pretty wonky, with uneven edges and curved surfaces that make them almost impossible to stack too high. Wonky is super simple, but super fun, and can accommodate any (!) number of players, with rules that can be explained in two minutes or less. It’s an easy recommendation for any game collection, whether your giftee is someone who’ll enjoy something breezy and silly to play between heavier games, or somebody looking for something fun and easy to enjoy with the whole family. (Buy it here.)

Gaming Accessories

Candles from Fantasy Scents

RRP: $22 each (and cheaper in bundles)

Many dungeon masters deploy an arsenal of tricks to set the mood or better convey the settings of their game nights, from tabletop miniatures and scenery, to medieval folk Spotify playlists and thematic cocktails or snacks. One overlooked method of transporting players into your roleplaying realm is, essentially, through aromatherapy. Smell is the closest-linked of our senses to emotion and memory — and, in turn, our imaginations. If you want your adventurers to feel more like they’re in a rowdy tavern or an arcane library, why don’t you try lighting a candle that smells like one?

Fantasy Scents have created a line of TTRPG-themed vegan soy candles in scents like Tavern, Campfire, Dungeon, Enchanted Forest, Nordic Sea, and Rain-Drenched Alleyway. Each one burns for roughly 40 hours and, as a fun bonus, contains a mystery D20 buried all the way at the bottom. Remember having to wait until you finished your cereal before you were allowed to dig out the prize? This gives you that same thrill, and a nice parting gift when the candle has reached its end. (Buy them here.)

Polyhedral Dice from FanRoll

RRP: $4.99 and up

One of the inarguable truths in the life of any tabletop roleplaying gamer is that there’s no such thing as having too many dice. (Especially if they, like me, will permanently retire a “cursed” D20 after too many catastrophic rolls.) With page after page of rollable options, FanRoll has all of your dice-buying needs covered.

FanRoll offer up a near-endless variety of dice made from a wide array of materials. They have resin dice in all sorts of colors and mix-ins; heavy, metal dice for that satisfying clickety-clack they make on the tabletop; silicone rubber dice for a fun bounce. On the higher end you’ll find their Gemstone Dice line, cut from stones such as agate, tiger’s eye, and synthetic turquoise; other just-as-classy options include their wooden dice sets carved from birch, cherry, and rose wood. Their Liquid Core dice are filled with glitter that shifts and shimmers when rolled; and measuring only 10mm, their Mini Dice sets are the most adorable way one could possibly roll for initiative. On the other end of the size spectrum are the Mega Dice, which measure 35mm and bring with them a thunderous rumble when they hit the table. (Pictured above? FanRoll’s Christmas-themed Santa Set.)

It doesn’t stop there, either — FanRoll also sells helpful accessories like dice trays, cases, and towers. Take some time to browse and you’re sure to find something that will pop out at you for your intended giftee. And if you’re planning ahead for next year, FanRoll’s Dice Advent Calendars sell out quickly, but can provide a whole holiday season’s worth of dice-related surprises for one very lucky friend. (Buy them here.)