Games we played during Christmas 2025

We played a lot of games over the holiday break. Some recs.

Timeline games

Hitster: Draw a card. Scan the QR code and a song plays on Spotify. Place it on your timeline based on the year the song was released. First player to line up 10 cards wins.

Chronology: Same idea as Hitster but cards with historical events written on them. Did you know the first looping roller coaster preceded the Gettysburg Address? Neither did I.

Weirdly, these games are not by the same company despite the same mechanic of completing a timeline of 10. I’ve never played a game with that mechanic and then played 2 with 4 days. Baader-Meinhof game moment, I guess.

 

Trickery games

Imposter: This is a free social deduction game that got a lot of play since we had several large gatherings.

 

Skull: I’ve boosted this game before. It’s reminiscent of poker or Liar’s Dice but we played a bunch over break with several groups and it universally loved. Even the 9 year-olds were super into it. Take 2 minutes to learn but then it’s very rich.

My favorite game review channel is Shut Up & Sit Down:

You really don’t need to buy the game to play it. Here’s the same game played with whatever cards you have around the house:

Finally, we played a giant round of a game I wrote about last year:

Left Center Right (1 min video)

This game is pure degeneracy and takes less than a minute to learn. Asian grandmas and 5-year-olds alike will lose their minds over it. Huge party hit this holidays. It’s actually an old game, but new to me. It has zero skill so when I heard how it works I immediately poo poo’d it but playing it in a group of 15 for a little cash is amazing.

If you want to make it skillful just create an open outcry side-market on who the winner is. Let’s say “Ann” is playing…Ann futures settle to 0 or 100 depending on if Ann wins so you can bid, offer, or trade any integer price between 0 and 100 based on your assessed probability of Ann winning. It’s a faithful simulation of mock trading (and really similar to the StockSlam game I was playing a couple years ago).

This year, we played a single round of LCR on Christmas Day that took close to an hour. 17 people with a $20 buy-in. Winner got $340. Asian aunties were rabid. Call me whatever you want, but “these people” love gambling.

[Because of the buy-in, we used poker chips instead of singles for tokens. I was told this took away from the experience since “grandma wants to see the cash”. Noted for next time.]