As the year comes to an end, something in the air starts to shift. Beyond the weather and our seasonal tastes in 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 rituals and play.
Pagans connect at Yule time, Wiccans 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 in support of a growing market forecasted to reach $41.63 billion by 2033. 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 games like Exploding Kittens and Taco Cat
- Social deduction like Codenames, Mafia, Blood on the Clocktower
- Collaborative experiences that benefit from larger groups or teams
Presence at the table
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.
Games as seasonal identity
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 last turn with that seven letter word?" Or; "Remember when the bank ran out of money and we used candy?"
These stories resurface every year and act as ancestral anchors in time. Even publishers lean into it. Every Christmas, Games Workshop releases a free Blood Bowl Holiday Special featuring Da Red Gobbo: a goblin revolutionary with a Santa hat, special seasonal rules, and a limited edition miniature that sells out within hours. Carcassonne takes it further with The 4 Seasons: a set of landscape tiles that transform the familiar French countryside into snow-covered villages, frozen rivers and autumn forests. It is modification as tradition, baked into the calendar by the publishers themselves.
This is house rules in action: families and publishers alike building versions of games that only exist for a few weeks each year.
Touch matters
We spend most of our year on screens, yet during the holidays, people instinctively reach for something tactile. Cards, dice, and boards sprawling with wooden tokens. There is 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 feel unhurried. From all of us at Moddable, warm wishes for a restful season we hope is filled with meaningful play.
