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Christmas 2025 Haul

Christmas is a time for family, a time for friends, and of course board games. I generally get my biggest hauls on Christmas and my birthday (well aside from when I splurge on myself). That being said, I generally still get myself a few games for myself when I don’t think other people will get them for me. This past Christmas I got 6 board games, only 1 of which I got myself (plus some magic cards), and some accessories.

13 Beavers

The first game I got is 13 Beavers*, which my mom got me (as most of the games on this list are from her). 13 Beavers is a game in which you and 1-5 other players play as beavers trying to make it upstream. At its core, 13 Beavers is a push your luck game of higher and lower. If the current card is 7 and you say “higher” and the next card is 9, you get to advance your beaver 1 space. However, don’t push your luck too much, if you’re wrong you get sent all the way back to your dam. If you decide you’ve pushed your luck enough, you yell “DAM!” and put your dam with your beaver. 

As the game goes on, you venture through various obstacle courses. First up is The Tempting Tunnel, where you can go from almost the beginning of the board to practically the end, however, there’s a catch. In order to get past the tunnel you must guess the next number exactly, or both your beaver and your dam go back to the start. 

Up next is lava. Now the lava isn’t actually as bad as it sounds, you just can’t stay there. If you land on the lava you have to continue to guess correctly until you land on a water space. If you don’t you go back to the last place your dam was. 

Some other obstacles are fish dinner, where you use a magnetic rod to go fishing. You get to pick 1 fish to catch, and once you catch it you flip it over to see if you got anything good. There’s the turbo fish which lets you move double the spaces for every correct guess on one turn. There’s the time travel fish which lets you retry if you guess wrong by putting the last card back on top of the deck. Finally there is the stinky fish which makes you move back two spaces and ends your turn. 

There’s also the rapids which either send you 3 spaces forward or 3 spaces backwards. 

Finally, there’s the wolf cave where you pick a wolf tile and flip it over, if the wolf is awake you stay where you are and your turn is over, however, if the wolf is asleep, remove all the other wolf tiles and continue your turn. 

The game ends when someone reaches the end first and becomes the winner. 

Overall: I think 13 Beavers is a fun quick game. However, I personally prefer games that have more strategy and less chance behind them. I think this a fun party size game without being a traditional party game, and can definitely be used as a warm up game for a game night session. I would give it a 6.5/10.

A Place for All My Books

The next game my mom got me is A Place For All My Books*. This is a very cosy game where you and up to 3 other people roleplay as avid readers and you have to keep your social battery in mind. A Place for All My Books is a solitaire type game, where you collect and sort books while trying to accomplish various goals.

In this game you start at home with a fairly low social battery level (SBL). While you’re home, you can take various actions to increase your SBL. This actions include:

• Rest: When you rest you increase you SBL by 2 and gain two “Little Projects” (goal cards)
• Sort: When you sort you increase your SBL by 1 and you pick up a stack of books and place individual books from the stack on top of other stacks or on empty spots. You can only place a max of 2 books on one spot. 
• Gather:When you gather you increase your SBL by 1 and take the top book from any number of stacks and either place the entire stack on an existing stack or on an empty space. Keep in mind there’s a max of 6 books on any given space. 
• Admire: When you admire you get to complete “Little Projects” in your hand and increase your SBL based on the goals you complete. If your color (red, yellow, blue, or purple) corresponds to the color of the most books you possess you get a bonus increase (if you are red and you have mostly red books). There are other ways to get bonuses when you admire, like with “Neat Stuff” cards.
• Read a Book: When you read a book you increase your SBL by 2 and move any one book from the top of a stack to the top of your night stand.

Once you charge up your SBL enough then you can leave the house. This action costs 5 SBL and once you get into you will spend more SBL, meaning it’s important to be close to your max SBL to ensure you can take as many actions as possible once you’re in the village. When you are in village you can take a variety of different actions:

• Library: When you go to the library you take 4 book tiles from the bag, choose one to add to your back pack and place 1 of the 3 remaining in each of the bookstore shelf piles. This action cost 1 SBL. 
• Bookstore: When you go to the bookstore, you take all of the book tiles and the “Little Projects” card from 1 shelf. This action costs various amounts, depending on which shelf you pick: Smallest 1 SBL, Medium 2 SBL, and Largest 6 SBL. 
• Exchange: When you wish to exchange books, you return any number of books (in order) from your nightstand to the book tile bag, and take that amount plus 1, then add them to your backpack. This action cost 1 SBL.
• Village Shoppes: When you go to the shoppes you can acquire “Neat stuff” cards for various costs. You can get one card for 4 SBL, both cards for 9 SBL, or you can pull a card off the top of the deck for 3 SBL.
• There is one spot on the village map that can’t be chosen per se. If someone chooses to take an action while you’re there, say you went to the bookstore on your turn, and then the next player decides they want to go to the bookstore on their turn, you then get bumped to the park. Although this isn’t an action you can choose, it does benefit you because your SBL increases by 2. 

When players decide to leave the house and go to the village, increase the sun tracker by 1. The game is over when the sun tracker reaches the last spot and everyone gets 1 last turn. 

Overall: I think A place for All My Books is really fun and cozy. If you like solitaire type games or books I think this is a game for you. It has easily become one of my most played games this year because of how much I like it. I like that there’s strategy while also being fairly lightweight that even my grandma can play and enjoy it. I would give it a 9/10. 

Kinfire Delve: Callous’ Lab

The next game on the list is Kinfire Delve: Callous’ Lab*, which my mom gave me money to get this for my boyfriend, but it was really something I wanted that we could play together. This game is a 1 to 2 player game (up to 4 if you have two copies of Kinfire Delve (any version)) where you play as a specific player and dive into a dungeon. 

In this game there are 4 well cards that surround the master. These cards can be interacted with in one of two ways. 

• Events: When you decide you want to interact with an event card, read the card and perform whatever the card says.
• Challenges: When you decide you want to interact with a challenge card, you will attempt the challenge.
  • To do so, play one of your skill cards that matches the color of the challenge card you want to attempt. 
  • Then you and the other player can decide if you want to boost the skill card (up to two times total). When you boost a skill card, you play another skill card for its boost action (which is at the bottom of the card) which also has to match the challenge you’re attempting. 
  • After that, you roll 4 dice, for each one that matches the challenge color, increase your progress amount by 1. If any dice result in white, that is a wild that matches all 3 colors and also adds 1 to your progress. If any of the dice result in black, it matches none of them.
  • After you’ve played your skill card, boosted the skill card (if you decided to do so), and rolled your dice, add up all of your progress to see if you completed or failed a challenge. You have completed it if your progress meets or beats the difficulty. However, if you don’t have enough progress to beat the challenge you fail and face whatever the punishment is. Once a challenge is completed, move it to your completed pile and replace it with a new one from the well deck.

As you play your skill cards throughout the game, you will deplete your hand as you don’t draw new cards at any point on your turn (unless a card tells you to). Once you run out of cards, you must take an exhaustion card and draw a new hand from your player deck. You can also choose to exhaust yourself if you don’t like your hand, however, keep in mind that exhaustion cards are always bad. 

Once you run out well cards in the well deck, remove all well cards from the board and replace them with the 4 gauntlet cards. You must complete the gauntlet cards in order to gain access to the master card. While you don’t have to complete all of the gauntlets to defeat the master, it does make it easier.

For most of the master cards, if you roll black while attempting the master card you must suffer the penalty rather than when you fail. 

You win the game when you defeat the master card. However, if you (solo) or your team (2-4 players) lose all of the collective health you lose the game. 

Overall: I really enjoy this game as well. I’ve only played it once and it was with two players so I can’t really speak to combining the games, but overall I thought it was a fun little co-op game. While this game does have some level of chance since dice are involved, it really comes down to the cards you have in hand and communicating with your teammates for how you want to delve into the dungeon. I think it’s a fun twist on the normal dungeon crawler type game since there’s no minis and it doesn’t take up much space. I would give it a 8/10. 

Quacks

Another game my mom got me, or rather my boyfriend, but really for me is Quacks*. Quacks is a bag building game, which is similar to deck building but instead of adding cards to a deck you’re adding pieces to a bag. This is a game for 1-4 players where you compete to brew the best potions. 

This game, originally known as Quacks of Quedlinburg, is a fairly quick game and while there is some strategy it is kind of left up to chance, just like any other blank building game. 

Each player is given a bag and a starting set of pieces. As the game progresses over its nine rounds, you and the other players will draft pieces based on your preferred strategy:

• Green Spiders: give bonus if they’re one of the last two tiles placed
• Black Moths: move your droplet forward if you have more on your board than others
• Blue Skulls: varies between the books
  • Place extra tiles
  • Buffer for exploding
  • Gaining rubies
  • Scoring immediate victory points
• Purple Ghost: the more you have on your board the bigger the benefit
• Mandrake: varies between the books
  • If next to a white boomberry put the boomberry back in your bag
  • Next token moves double
  • Increase explosion limit
  • The more mandrakes you have the further they move
• Orange Pumpkin: either more 1 or 6 spaces
• Mushroom:varies between the books
  • Go further based on number of pumpkins
  • Save for a later moment
  • Go further based on the printed value of the white piece before it
  • White pieces go further

The nice thing about this game is you get to choose different books every game which add a level of replayibilty to it. 

As stated above this game is played over the course of 9 rounds. During each round players will simultaneously be placing pieces on their board hoping to go further and further each round. You can choose when you want to stop placing pieces, however sometimes the game does it for you. If you reach a total value of 7 white bloomberries, then your cauldron explodes. It’s not the end of the world if it explodes, but it does limit what you get to do that round. 

The goal is to end the game with the most victory points to be deemed the winner.

Overall: I think this game is really fun. I have fewer gripes with the chance in this than I do in 13 Beavers, because at least in this you get to build your bag and choose what pieces you want to put inside. That being said, I wish there were just a few less bloomberries. It kind of sucks when the first few you play are all 1s and you get up to 4 bloomberries before you’ve even hit 10 points on the board and you could call it or risk it. However, the two times I risked it I had a ⅛ and a 1/14 chance of pulling the bloomberry and exploding and that’s happened both times. That being said, I’d still give this game an 8/10. 

Stitch Monopoly Deal

The last game my mom got me was Stitch Monopoly Deal*. I haven’t really played this or regular Monopoly Deal yet so I don’t really have much to say on it. It wasn’t really a game I asked for, but my mom knows I like Stitch and board games so it was one of my stocking stuffers. 

Azul

The last game I got was Azul* which was given to me by J. 

In Azul you are trying to get the most points by creating your own mosaic. In this game, there are a set amount of pieces depending on the number of players, set in the center of the table. The first step is to choose pieces from the center of the table. Starting with the first player you will take all of one color from a factory display, and then you’ll put the rest in center of the table. You can also choose to take from the center of the table and if you’re the first player to do so, you will also take the first player token. Once you take the tiles, you will place them on your board. You’ll continue taking turns to get tiles until the tiles are all gone.

Once all of the tiles have been claimed, starting with the top row, if you have a filled a full row, you take the right most tile from your board and move it to your wall and remove the rest of the tiles in that one. If you have any uncompleted rows, those remain for the next turn. When you place a tile on your wall, you will note any titles that are touching it and you’ll get points based on that. So if you place a title and it makes a row of 3 and a column of 2, you will get 3 points for the row and 2 for the column for a total of 5 points.

You will reset the center of the table and repeat these steps until someone has one complete horizontal row on their wall, at which point the game will end. And you will score your last placed tiles. Once everyone has calculated their points, the person with the most points wins.

Overall: I’ve only played this game once since getting it, but I did enjoy it. I’m not sure how it would play with more people, but I did feel like it was a little limiting with two people. I know there’s an Azul Duel and maybe I should try that version at some point.

Stuff I got myself for Christmas:

I got the four Bloomburrow Commander decks. I both am and aren’t new to magic. I started playing in 2015 and played pretty consistently until 2018 and then played on and off from 2019-2022 and then stopped playing all together. I picked it up again last year and have proxied most of my cards, but I wanted to have some real cards and some precons. I love the woodland creatures of Bloomburrow and thought that would be a good place to start. I haven’t really played any of them, but I have played the Squirreled Away* one and the Animated Army* one once each. I feel like they could both use some upgrading to be fun for my play style, but I haven’t had time to really think about them much since I got them. The two I haven’t played are the Peace Offering* one and the Family Matters* one. If you are interested in getting all 4 or most of them, the 4 Bloomburrow decks* is the cheapest way to do, other than proxying which is also completely valid. 

I also got some accessories for myself. I got myself and each person in my magic group a playmat from Wizard of Barge from their Kickstarter because I love their artwork. This is the one I got myself.  I also got the Quiver Time Case* for myself so I can carry my decks easier than just piled in my backpack. Finally the last thing my mom got me was the Quiver Time Playmat Tube*. I have really enjoyed using all of these, and the playmat tube even works with the Wizard of Barge Playmat despite it being super thick.