Hopefully, there is a special someone (or at least a someone you’re obligated to buy holiday gifts for) in your life that is into board games. If so, don’t buy them board games! Buy them cool stuff that helps them store or organise their board games, they’ll like that better.
Feldherr Storage Inserts & Bags
If you know someone into a game with miniatures, whether it be 40K or X-Wing, these are the bees knees. They’re padded bags carrying special foam sheets—often custom-cut—that you can store delicate pieces in, keeping them safe both in storage and when moving around in a car or something. The item linked below is for X-Wing, but Feldherr sell loads more types for different games. (Price varies)
Gripmat
Regular table surfaces are fine for most people’s gaming, but when you’ve gotta move pieces around and soften the impact of dice rolling around the place, a good mat is worth the price. GripMat’s are probably the best out there, as they’re thicker and grippier than most of the competition, which tend to be little more than giant mousepads. You can get them blank, or with specific graphics printed on them more suitable for games like Tanks, Wings of War or X-Wing. (Price varies)
Wyrmwood Dice Towers
Wyrmwood make a whole range of gorgeous, quality accessories for board games, but the nicest are probably their dice towers, which aside from being available in a variety of woods are also held together magnetically, so you can disassemble them and tuck them away for storage/travel.
You can buy them here. ($75-$325)
Treasure Chests
While Stonemaier make their own games (like the excellent Scythe), they’ve also got a cool side-project where they release premium game parts for a select series of titles, both of their own and other company’s making. If someone’s favourite dungeon crawler or Cthulhu game uses cardboard/plastic tokens and pieces, these Treasure Chests offer replacements made of premium materials like ceramic and metal, which are available both in small sets of 10x tokens, as well as larger boxes. (Price varies, $4-150)
KMC Card Sleeves
There are a lot of sleeves out there on the market for the kind of person who needs to keep their Magic/Netrunner/Pokemon cards in pristine condition. KMC’s are, I think, the best, both in terms of fit and in build quality. (Price varies)
Tea Tins
Tea tins are handy for keeping actual tea leaves in, yeah, but they’re also cool options for storing dice and game tokens, since they stack neatly, look nice and have transparent lids so that you can see what’s in each tin. (Amazon, $11)
Flight Deck Card Organizer
There are a number of good organisers out there on the market (I’ve used e-Raptor’s previously and liked them), designed to keep your assortment of cards and tokens in one handy place. My favourite at the moment is the Flight Deck, because with its vertical orientation it not only keeps things tidy, but gives you some privacy and, most important of all, can save precious table space.