If You’re Shopping List Includes Older Kids and Adults, Check Out These Games!

2023 Holiday Gift Guide filled with games that make great gifts for teens and adults

As you balance the day between recovering from yesterday’s feast and tackling Black Friday crowds, we’re here with another list of gift suggestions! This one is geared toward that group of hard-to-shop for older kids, young adults and grown-ups. I mean, seriously, they mostly just ask for expensive electronics and gift cards. The reality is there are people in this segment we WANT to purchase gifts for but their Santa wish-list and our budget don’t necessarily align. That’s where this list comes into play (pun intended!) with game ideas that help bring them together with family and friends.

Of course, don’t forget to keep watch for some of these in this years list of holiday giveaways. So you can purchase one as a gift then maybe score a copy for yourself too. If you happen to purchase something by clicking through one of our links, we may receive a small commission.


The One Hundred Torii: Diverging Paths

Pencil First Games

Wander back to your Japanese garden to find new locations and characters to expand The One Hundred Torii. Walk along new paths past unique shrines and discover new gameplay strategies as you relax in nature with all of the brand new content.


Furnace with Interbellum Expansion

Arcane Wonders

Furnace is an engine-building game in which players take on the roles of 19th-century capitalists building their industrial corporations and aspiring to make as much money as they can by purchasing companies, extracting resources, and processing them in the best combinations possible.

The Interbellum expansion brings the game into the 1920s and 1930s, the interwar period known as the Interbellum.


Amalfi Renaissance

R&R Games

You are a merchant in ancient Amalfi, eager to rebuild your wealth. Launch your ships to establish trade routes and return with treasures.


Players organize their junk drawer by carefully arranging various shaped items within the four sections. Each section has a unique organizational goal and each round, players must place one item in each section. At the end of the game, each section earns points based on how well they are organized. The player with the highest score wins.


The Search for Lost Species

Renegade Game Studios

Thousands of discovered plants and animals haven’t been seen for decades and could be on the brink of extinction! To save these lost species, we must find them again.

The Search for Lost Species is an eco-friendly game about this real-world search, utilizing the game system created for the award-winning Search for Planet X.


Calendar of Many Adventures 2024

Loke BattleMats

The first wall calendar you can use as an RPG Map! 12 beautiful maps, a month per page view calendar and 12 PDF 5E adventures to play on the maps. Now game night will organise itself!


CDSK (Curious Delightful Seasoned Knowledge) is a trivia game that asks you to be honest with yourselves. How well do you know this subject? Too confident? You won’t go anywhere. Too careful? You’ll be crawling. But if you answer just right… you’ll zoom off to glorious victory!


Critical: Sanctuary (Season 1)

Gigamic

On the Crescent archipelago, ancient tombs stir, and tales of monsters resurface. The Explorers’ Guild seeks answers, dispatching their most skilled members. In Critical: Sanctuary (Season 1), experience 9 thrilling 30-minute episodes in this uniquely crafted board game. Choose your role as Gamemaster or a character, dive into heart-pounding adventures, and uncover the mysteries!


A wonderfully collaborative, dice manipulation, coop game featuring a cube of 64 dice on a rotating platform.


Terraforming Mars: The Dice Game

Stronghold Games

Terraforming Mars: The Dice Game, is a card driven dice game where players use special dice to develop their corporations and terraform Mars into a new home for humanity. The dice represent resources that players spend to play cards and perform other actions. During the game you increase your production of dice, you terraform and place cities and greenery tiles on the board and gain various bonuses.


Tiny Epic Crimes

Gamelyn Games

Tiny Epic Crimes is a fast-paced, crime-fighting, deduction game for 1 to 4 players that offers multiple ways to play. Players take on the role of detectives, and depending on the game mode, will be working either together…. OR separately…. to crack the murder case. In Tiny Epic Crimes, time matters, and the first 48 hours after any crime are the most critical. Players race around the city collecting evidence, such as the murder weapon, forensics, or the getaway vehicle.


The Night Hunter

University Games

In this latest Murder Mystery Party Game, can you catch the Night Hunter before he strokes again? After confessing to a series of disturbing, animalistic murders, Bill Mendax – or “The Night Hunter” as he was dubbed in the press – was sentenced to life in prison. The public breathed a sigh of relief, thinking The Night Hunter’s reign of terror was over…that is, until a murder with similarities previously not released to the public occurs over 25 years later. Is it a copycat? Or is the wrong person behind bars? Play as an agent hired by The Bureau as you explore over 100 unique pieces of evidence to learn about The Night Hunter’s past and stop another murder from happening in the present.


Bazaars of Ubar

Grey Fox Games

Bazaars of Ubar is a fantastical engine-building game that takes players to the mythical marketplaces of Ubar – the Atlantis of the Sands! Draft trade using time as currency in a marketplace where the costs shift like the sands. Make clever use of tradewinds to reactivate your trades. And manage the space on your ship to carry only the most precious cargo as you make your way to floating bazaars to sell your wares for gold!


Radlands

Roxley Games

Radlands is a competitive, dueling card game about identifying fiercely powerful card synergies.

Act as the leader of your post apocalyptic group of survivors in a tooth-and-nail fight to protect your three camps from a vicious rival tribe. If all of them are destroyed, you lose the game.


A very unconventional deck building card game of wizardly combat where you build your spell deck as you play.


A wide orchard lies in front of Applejack’s cottage.

Help him and his daughter plant apple trees and harvest the juicy apples. Don’t forget to set up the beehives between the trees. Because at the end of this game, whoever gets the most honey wins!


Our prior family games gift guide includes additional items that could fit into this age group as well. What makes those different is they can also accommodate slightly younger individuals while these are mostly 14+ due to their length or complexity. And if you need ideas for preschool and elementary aged kids, check out the list of gifts for younger kids.

Who on your list is the most difficult to shop for?

 

39 thoughts on “If You’re Shopping List Includes Older Kids and Adults, Check Out These Games!

  1. Several good games on this list. I would love to get my hands on a number of them, such as Tesseract, Junk Drawer, Tiny Epic Crimes (just to name a few).

  2. Junk Drawer or Radlands would be nice.
    The person that buys everything for themselves, and has tons of money to do it, and doesn’t let you know what their recent purchases are, can be frustrating to get anything for.

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