venta

OK, you people know Stuff about Things. Please can you help me out?

Every year I have a huge struggle trying to find something for a couple of my best friends for Christmas. I'm not entirely sure why, but I find it impossible to gauge their tastes accurately, and have ended up with some fairly limp presents of late.

They're big boardgamers, and I've always avoided that because I'm not very well-informed on the topic. I love games, but they don't seem to happen much in my life at the moment. The last time I felt I had my finger on the pulse, Settlers of Catan was big news.

So, I'd like recommendations of things to give a couple of hard-core boardgamers for Christmas this year. I'm really quite unsure what games they already have stashed round their house, so I think it probably needs to be something quite new, or something quite obscure, to be certain of not giving them something they're already familiar with.

I think they already have all the Arkham Horror expansion packs in the world (ditto Carcassonne). I've played Tales of the Arabian Nights, Shadows Over Camelot, Robo Rally and some other Greek-myth-based game (whose name I forget) with them in recent years. Also Apples To Apples, which one of them described as "what you play while you're waiting for enough people to show up to play a game".

I think they also play a lot of the more traditional games like chess, Go, backgammon and Othello. And poker. Lots of poker.

Any advice or recommendations gratefully accepted.

PS

beckyl, if you're thinking "why don't you just come in to the shop and ask me this?", then I shall probably be doing exactly that on the way home this evening :)