Gifts for board game lovers, printed from game night
The best gifts for board game lovers are not another game: a print of a game-night photo, or a mug for the table, shows you paid attention without guessing at their shelf. Gifts for board game lovers have an obvious answer and a bad one. The obvious answer is another game, and the reason it is bad is that they know the hobby far better than you do, own the ones they want, and have opinions about the rest.
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A regular player keeps a list. They know what's coming out, what they nearly bought, and what they deliberately didn't. Buying into that list without being on the inside of it is a coin toss, and an expensive one.
What they have none of is anything made out of the group itself. Board gaming is unusual among hobbies in that the good part is a room full of people, and hardly anyone photographs it.
The pictures that already exist
Look at the group chat. There is nearly always something in there worth printing:
- A board mid-game, shot from above, when the position had got interesting.
- The table with everybody round it, taken by whoever remembered.
- Something drawn: a map somebody made, a scoring sheet with a running total going back years.
Any of those beats an expansion, because none of them can be bought. Upload the photo or a scan of the map to custom art prints and it's printed as it is.
What gifts for board game lovers usually get wrong
Two failures, and they are opposites. The first is buying a game, which assumes you know a collection you haven't seen. The second is buying something generic with meeples printed on it, which assumes the hobby is the identity, not the evenings.
The hobby is the evenings. Anything that points at the specific table (these people, that game, the night it went to the wire) sidesteps both failures at once, and it doesn't require you to know the collection at all.
Choose something the group will use
It's also the format that suits a photograph of people, which does not always want to be on a wall in somebody's house but works perfectly at postcard size in a hand.
Getting a usable photograph of a table
Three things, and none needs equipment. Shoot from directly above, not at an angle, so the board is a rectangle and not a trapezium. Turn the big light off and use a window or a lamp from one side, so the pieces have shadows and read as objects. And wipe the crisps off the table first, which sounds facetious and is the single most common reason a game-night photograph can't be printed.
If the game came with figures somebody painted, the miniature photography guide covers getting close enough to them without the phone losing focus.
What to avoid
Anything involving the publisher's artwork. A print of somebody else's box art is their design, not a gift you made, and it is exactly the kind of thing this approach is meant to replace. The photograph of your own table is the part that belongs to your group.
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Questions and answers
What do you buy someone who owns every board game?
Not a game. Something made from their own table: a photograph of a night everybody was there, the board mid-game, or components somebody painted.
How do I photograph a board so it prints well?
From directly above so it stays a rectangle, lit from one side, not by the ceiling light, and clear the table first.
Can you print the game's own artwork?
No. That's the publisher's design. The photograph of your own table is the part that belongs to your group, and it makes the better present anyway.
What goes well with a board game as a gift?
Something from the table they already play at. A photo of the board mid-game, or the group around it, can go on an art print, a framed print at 11.7 x 16.5 in or 16.5 x 23.4 in, or a mug for game night. If the game itself is the present, a print of the first night you play it together makes the follow-up gift. We don’t sell games or accessories, so the picture has to come from your own table.
