As the year comes to an end, something in the air starts to shift – beyond the weather and the music. Homes become louder. Tables fuller and schedules slower. Whether around a Christmas roast or during the candle-lit evenings of Hanukkah, families gather not just to exchange gifts, but to reconnect through ritual. Pagan’s connect at Yule time, Wiccan’s find solace in the Winter Solstice and the Hindu spend 5 days honouring Ganesh. Increasingly, December rituals also provide opportunities for playing games.
In the UK alone, 6 out of 10 adults expect to play board games during the festive season and 42% of those asked were also planning to buy new games as gifts. Although classics such as Monopoly and Scrabble remain the dominant choices during the festivities there has also been a rise in demand for quick party card games such as Exploding Kittens and Taco Cat Goat Cheese Pizza as well as social deductions like Codenames, Werewolves and the more recent and extremely expensive Blood on the Clocktower, which all benefit from having larger groups.
For much of the year, our lives are fragmented. Different schedules dotted across different devices fostering indifferent attention spans. Nonetheless, during the year-end festivities, something remarkable happens. People sit at the same table, sometimes for hours. As the meals settle and desserts are shared, someone will inevitably say, “Shall we play something?”
It may be a small sentence, but it signals something larger. It signals presence.
Games help to fill the gaps between conversations and silence. They give structure to togetherness, turning a table into a shared arena. A rulebook becomes a temporary social contract and for an hour or three; everyone’s engaged in the same story. What makes holiday gameplay different from a regular Saturday night session?
Tradition.
Some families replay the same game every year or pit the same teams against each other. They tweak and bend the rules. Inside jokes become embedded into everyone’s strategies. Over time, the game stops being just a game. It becomes part of the family’s seasonal identity.
“Remember the year Mum won on the very last turn with that seven letter word?”
“Remember when the bank ran out of money and we started using real cash?”
In some households Da Red Gobbo might even appear for a game!
These stories resurface every year, and act as ancestral anchors in time. We spend most of our year on screens. But during the holidays, people instinctively reach for something tactile. Cards, dice, and boards sprawling with wooden tokens. There’s something grounding about physical components in a season so saturated by digital noise. Touch matters, almost as much as shared eye contact and the sound of dice hitting the table.
Whether you celebrate Christmas, Hanukkah or simply the gift of being together, we hope you find moments around a table that feels unhurried. From all of us at Moddable, warm wishes for a restful season filled with meaningful play.
