2022 d20 Radio Gift Guide

November 25, 2022 Wayne Basta Editorial, Gift Guide 0

Welcome to holiday season 2023! We here are d20 Radio talk about games. A lot. So we like to put out a guide for those doing some shopping with good gift ideas for your gamers. Sit back, relax, and try to buy these from your LFG rather than Amazon.

From Linda Whitson

Tales of the RED: Street Stories

Tales of the RED: Street Stories is a collection of 9 missions for R. Talsorian Games’ Cyberpunk RED RPG. These aren’t screamsheets but full scenarios complete with maps, NPCs, and other stats. I ran the “A Night at the Opera” adventure as a Halloween game for my Discord group and we had a good time.

Cost: USD $40 (book) or $20 (PDF)

Purchase Links

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OneBookShelf Gift Certificates

For when you aren’t sure what your favorite gamers have in their library. Or you would love to buy them a title that won’t be released until 2023. The digital “certificates” are available in amounts friendly to nearly any budget. I really enjoy getting these.

They are usable at any of the OneBookShelf sites: Drive Thru RPG, Dungeon Masters Guild, Drive Thru Cards, Wargame Vault, Pathfinder Infinite, Storytellers Vault, and Drive Thru Fiction.

Cost: $5 – $100 (USD values only)

From Wayne Basta

Curled Paw Creative

If you’re like me and enjoy enhancing your gaming experience with bits of acrylic to replace the bog standard cardboard, you need to check out Curled Paw Creatives Etsy store. Andrew Nuckols has created a wide variety of token replacements and additions. Some of his pieces are very creative and enhance the game far more than just turning cardboard to plastic. His double sided tokens are a real treat. The double sided Focus/Evade tokens and Strain/Deplete tokens let you free up a slot in your tournament kit as you have one less token to carry with you.

While I discovered him through X-Wing, he sells more than just X-Wing stuff, including Legion, TCG, and Gundam.

As this is an Etsy store, you can also purchase an Etsy gift card to allow your gamer friend to pick out exactly what they need for their game if you aren’t sure.

My City

My family has been playing this game once a week for awhile now. It is a lightly competitive legacy game. The basics are a tile placement game, where you endeavor to put down your city tile pieces in the most opportune way to score points. It’s a bit like Tetris and a jigsaw puzzle. The game is broken into Chapters, each containing three episodes. Each Chapter adds a new rules wrinkle to the way the game is played. How you score points one chapter will be different in the next. Some rules carry over from chapter to chapter, including the addition of new stickers to your game board that permanently change it. At the end of the of the chapters, you compare overall victory point scores to determine a winner.

While it is a competitive game, for the most part, you are just playing your own board. There are winners for each episode, and an overall winner, but you’re mostly competing against yourself to see how well you can build your city. Some episodes, there are scoring elements that go to the first person to do a thing, but for the most part, what another person does has no impact on what you do.

Seraph’s Break

Okay, this isn’t a game. And it is blatant self-promotion. But the series was originally inspired by games so we’ll roll with that. This is the latest book following the adventures of the crew of Seraph, an independent transport ship that gets into far too much trouble. You can read the first too, Seraph’s Gambit and Seraph’s Bind, which will be on sale next week before Break comes out Dec. 1st.

This book finds the crew out in unexplored space, hiding from the consequences of their actions. But is roaming around unknown regions really safer than vindictive crime organizations? Surely not. Nothing could possibly go wrong for our plucky band of heroes.

From Kim Frandsen

Army Painter Speedpaints  (Starter or Mega set)

Many of us have huge piles of plastic laying around our houses, the piles of shame, of miniatures that we bought, hoping to use them in some game or other, but which are just languishing now. Piles that we, if we’re being honest, will likely never find the chance to completely paint.

But that’s where the speedpaints come in. They’re a “primer and one coat of paint” type of solution. Meaning you spray them white, slap on the paint, and done. No shading, and no highlight.
If I’m being honest though, that is not how I use them. I use something that’s become all the rage recently, called slap-chop. It’s actually an older style of painting (where it was called underpainting or grisaille) where you start with a black miniature, drybrush on some grey and white, and then you put on the pain that you want on top. This gives you a far more shaded look and a fairly gritty-looking model, but which at the same time looks good enough to be on the tabletop. Is it an award-winning paint-job? No, but it’s a lot nicer looking than the plastics, and in many cases, better looking than pre-painted miniatures. And the best part is that you don’t have to spend hours painting – it’s where the speedpaints shiny due to the fluid nature. (The same goes for Games Workshop’s Contrast Paints, but those tend to be a lot more expensive).

Prices for the paint sets go from $45 to $99, so should be good for a “mid-range” present in terms of cost.

Twilight Imperium 4th Edition

Next up we have something that’s definitely NOT for beginners, nor is it cheap. In fact, at $165 MSRP, it’s going to be my most expensive recommendation, by a long shot. But it is HUGE. And playing a game takes absolute hours. I know that on the box, they say it takes 4-8 hours, which is probably true if you’re playing the rules as they’re set out. But I know that a lot of people include extra time to build and break alliances among the players, and I don’t think I’ve ever played a game of Twilight Imperium (regardless of edition) that ran less than 8 hours. Normally they’re at 12+. They’re definitely a weekend or holiday-style board game, and not one you can play with your kids, as it’s too involved. For older friends and family though, it’s perfect.
(Now if I could only convince the family to play Twilight Imperium on Christmas Eve, we’d be sorted, but noo… Monopoly it is.)

Gingerbread Kaiju

Gingerbread Kaiju is a game of baking and eating monsters. I mean, what’s not to like? The game itself is easy and it’s fun for the whole family, from the smallest to the largest, as long as they can understand simple rules, and like Gingerbread. You build a Kaiju (you can use one of the provided templates, and there’s even a Gingerbread recipe included), you fight against each other, and as the Kaiju take damage, you eat them. It’s really rather simple, but it’s a good way to spend some time while waiting for the Christmas meal and to have a few laughs together.
It’s also cheap, as it only comes in a PDF format, clocking in at $3 – plus whatever costs you have in making the Gingerbread. (Side note, we stopped using the Gingerbread recipe a few years ago, to use something called pebernødder/pepper nuts/pfeffernüsse instead, as we think it’s a nicer biscuit/cake.

You can find a recipe for that here: https://nordicfoodliving.com/danish-peppernuts-pebernodder/ (and a further side note: They don’t contain pepper, but cardamom and cinnamon)).

Finally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t include one of my own, wouldn’t I? 🙂

Absalom Drift: Turbocharged

For those of you who play Starfinder, you know that your group of heroes starts with a starship, even at 1st level. But that always felt a bit off to me. The starship is as much a part of the story for the heroes as the Mystery Van is a part of the story for the Scooby Gang or the Millennium Falcon for Han Solo and friends. And therefore I believe it deserves to be more than a prop. So, here is an adventure where the heroes acquire (steal) their first starship, before setting off on a grand adventure. Furthermore, the adventure is written so that you can have multiple different playthroughs with different groups, and never quite have the same experience. In all, there are more than 200 different variations (in fact, I believe the figure is more than 800, but I gave up counting after 200. :P)

And for $4, I don’t think you can get much better. 🙂

From Egg Embry

OPERATIVES AND CIVILIANS from Bammax Gaming

Is your giftee a fan of the Burn Notice TV series? How about a spy/operative RPG fan who enjoys the Lasers & Feelings system? Does the idea of a full RPG presented as a tri-fold pamphlet sound like the perfect stocking stuffer? Then Operatives and Civilians might the be a great game to gift this holiday season. In O&C, you play as an operator, a sort of spy, that is righting wrongs while trying to uncover the mystery of why you were cast out into the cold by your patron/spy agency. Using the Lasers & Feelings system offers a rules lite system that captures the feel of Burn Notice.

Vast Grimm from Infinite Black and Creature Curation

Looking for MÖRK BORG in space? Sure there are several options, but Vast Grimm manages to capture the aesthetic of MÖRK BORG without being a slavish clone. Imagine grimdark science fiction with a visual flare that puts you in the mind of MÖRK BORG, but has a unique feel. The universe is dying, it is a decaying horror full of terrors and terrible people. Against that sci-fi backdrop, you’re just trying to survive. Vast Grimm is a masterclass in repurposing the MÖRK BORG system combined with Brian Colin’s visuals and writing into a memorable dark horror sci-fi RPG.

MAZES from 9th Level Games

MAZES is a revelation in convention gaming. Your character is represented by a single die, you describe what you’ll do and roll against static tables. Easy to explain, offering simple but effective play. Mechanically, that means the Paragon (the d4) is superior against mental (Books) and dexterous (Boots) situations that roll on tables with lower target numbers, while a d10 (the Sentinel) is more likely to succeed at combat (Blades) and physical challenges (Bones) because they have a wider range of target numbers. Once you try it, the game is intuitive as it combines the old school feel of fantasy RPG with modern mechanics. What can I say other than this, the game that I had the most fun running this year was MAZES at Gen Con.

From Ben Erickson

Backstory Cards Vol. 2
Galileo Games

I’ve talked at length about these cards before. In short, these cards offer a fun and collaborative way for the players to create shared backstory with their characters at the beginning of a campaign by invoking important characters, themes, and events that exist in your campaign world and tying the characters to them. Well, the end of 2021 saw a release of a full second volume of these cards to further augment your deck. What do you get the DM who has everything? Less work in weaving that shared backstory.

 

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Wayne Basta

Editor-in-Chief at d20 Radio
Wayne is the managing editor of d20 Radio's Gaming Blog. He also writes Sci-fi, . If you enjoy his work, you can support him on Patreon.
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