Benable — create shareable lists of things you recommend!
E.g., products you love, local businesses, travel recs - you can add anything to a Benable list!
Secret Santa Gifts Under $25 People Actually Keep
11
items The office Secret Santa problem is that you are buying for someone whose taste you do not know, with a hard price cap, in front of an audience. Games solve it: they get opened at the table, everyone plays, and nobody has to pretend to like a candle. ...
Sections
3
Safe bets for a group who barely know each other
Quieter, for one person who plays with one other
Not a game at all
Safe bets for a group who barely know each other
These five work with strangers, which is the whole test for an office gift. No reading, nothing to learn, and they all take eight players or more.
Telephone played with drawings. You sketch a prompt, pass it on, the next person guesses what it was, and by the end of the pad it has turned into something nobody recognises. The best twenty dollars you can spend on a room full of people who do not ...
Telestrations (6 player)
A card game that stops halfway through so people can throw foam burritos at each other. It is the one gift in the pile that gets a reaction when it comes out of the wrapping, which matters in a room of colleagues.
Throw Throw Burrito
The safest twenty dollar game to hand to someone you know nothing about. Fifteen minutes, no reading, and the artwork does the work of making it look like a considered present rather than a panic buy.
Exploding Kittens Card Game
Two teams, one word clues, a grid of words on the table. It is the only game on this list that people who dislike party games will admit to enjoying, because the clue giving is a genuine puzzle.
Codenames
Someone names a color with a two word clue, everyone guesses where it sits on a grid of 480 shades. Takes three players or ten, and the arguments about whether teal is blue are the actual game.
Hues & Cues
Quieter, for one person who plays with one other
For the colleague who mentions playing games at home with a partner. These three are short, good looking on a shelf, and work properly at two players.
Pick a card, pass the rest, repeat. It plays properly at two, which most party games do not, and a game takes twenty minutes. The version with Party in the name has the extra menus, so it is the one to buy.
Sushi Go Party Game
The full Azul in a box the size of a paperback. Tile drafting, twenty minutes, and it looks good enough on a shelf that people keep it out. The best looking thing you can buy for twenty two dollars.
Azul Mini
Ticket to Ride cut down to fifteen minutes and two to four players. Anyone who has played the big version already knows the rules, and anyone who has not can learn them in one round.
Ticket to Ride: Berlin
Not a game at all
Three for when the recipient has said outright that they do not play games. All of them sit on a desk or a kitchen counter and get used every week.
The most used object on my desk. Anyone who works at a computer forgets their coffee within ten minutes, every day, forever. This is the gift that solves a problem the recipient has stopped noticing.
Mr. Coffee Mug Warmer
For the colleague who has mentioned wanting to try fermenting. These screw onto a mason jar and let the gas out on their own, which removes the one step people get wrong and the one reason jars explode.
Masontops Pickle Pipes (4 pack)
Glass weights that hold the vegetables under the brine. Anything that floats above the liquid grows mold, so this is the part that decides whether a first attempt works. Buy them with the Pickle Pipes.
Masontops Pickle Pebbles (4 pack)