That's right, because it is December (already? Wasn't it just Halloween?), it's time for my Geek Gift Giving Guide! Every year I write this column, and every year I recycle 90% of my ideas from the past December columns, and every year I try to add some new twist to justify its existence. This year, because I am just so awesome and kind, I am going to include links to great items and sources for items, thus saving YOU, my dear reader, a little bit of time and effort. As is tradition, before I get down to the nitty-gritty, I shall ramble on a bit about the holidays. Prior to sitting down to write this column, I spent a significant chunk of my day and my bank account doing my on-line holiday shopping. Although I believe in supporting local businesses, I also believe in saving myself a ton of time by doing almost everything from my computer. To keep my conscience happy, I ordered from a lot of small businesses, so I'm still helping the little guy, so to speak. That said, while I will be supplying links to a lot of items and stores, I whole-heartedly recommend that you support your local gaming store! If you can buy these items locally, please do. Remember that even if the shop doesn't have things on the shelf, they may be able to order them for you. If you don't have a local gaming store, I like Stiggybaby (www.stiggybaby.com). They have a great selection, many of their items are discounted, and they don't charge you through the nose for shipping like some on-line retailers do (no joke, one place wanted to charge me $20 to ship $35 worth of stuff, and it wasn't even heavy!). You can also get a lot of gaming sourcebooks and such from large retailers like Amazon.com, but then you're helping a soulless corporate entity (ok, ok, so I ordered from them today, too, but it wasn't gaming stuff!). And, as usual, this column is mostly geared towards helping slightly clueless people figure out what to buy for gaming geeks. So feel free to forward it to your well-meaning but out of touch relatives. With that said, on with the column! Card games make great gifts. I say it every year, and I'll keep saying it until they're all replaced by computerized versions. The tricky thing about card games is finding ones which are worth the price. Quite often I see one that looks pretty fun, but it's $20 for a deck about the size of your standard normal-person playing card deck. I guess it must cost a lot to make niche games or something, but I'm just not shelling out that sort of dough. Before I get down to specific card-game recommendations, I'd like to state my long-held opinion that collectible card games do not make good gifts. They tend to be annoyingly complicated to learn and require the player to buy lots of silly booster packs to build the perfect deck. Of course, the exception to this is that if you're shopping for a CCG player, it's more than acceptable to buy them expansions and boosters, as long as you know specifically what game they play. And now I'd like to take a moment to state a newer opinion of mine, which is that the World of Warcraft card game is laaaaaaame. Please, people! It's not enough for you to spend your money on the computer game, and then spend $15/month playing it, and waste hours of your life sitting there playing it, and then talk about it when you should be playing D&D, and bore people who don't play it with endless details about it, and ditch your friends to go on "raids" which take hours, but now you have to buy a card game in hopes of unlocking new items in the game? Get a life. And coming from a roleplaying geek, that should sting. Nothing that you can say about the game is going to stop me from mocking you for buying it. And don't try to say that it's just because you like the artwork on the cards. That's as believable as saying you like Playboy for the articles. Where was I? Oh yes. Good card games. I'm always a fan of Munchkin of any sort. The newest game, Munchkin Impossible, has just now come out, so it's a fair guess that the geek in your life doesn't have it yet, even if they have most of the other Munchkin games. Chez Geek is also pretty fun. Our friend Dylan brought it when he visited a few months back, and we had a good time all preventing each other from ever getting any nookie. If you played, you'd understand. It should prove especially popular with college-age geeks and anyone who has a roommate. Creatures and Cultists is a ridiculously funny card game perfect for any fan of Lovecraftian horror. This was also played heavily during Dylan's last visit, and likewise proved popular when we brought it to NY to play with my brother-in-law and one of his friends. Knowledge of Lovecraft's work is not necessary to play, but it does enhance the experience. One of my personal favorites is Elixir. Sure, it's got faeries on the cover, but it plays like Truth or Dare on crack. For extra fun, play it when you're out in public (we played at our local dessert lounge, prompting great confusion from our waiter). As a bonus, it's enjoyable for non-geeks as well. My holiday gift guide wouldn't be complete without Cheapass Games. No, I'm not kidding, so I'll mention them now. Remember how I was talking about $20 card games? Cheapass Games are just the opposite of that. They're cheaply produced board games which require you to scavenge playing pieces from your existing board games. They're also hilarious, and usually pretty quick to play. Good for any gathering where you won't get in trouble for saying "ass." What's another thing that I tell you to buy every year? That's right, DICE! Every gamer likes dice. Every gamer needs dice. My friend Alex needs to stop losing his dice and borrowing mine! Just kidding. I always bring enough to share. There are tons of awesome dice to be purchased, in interesting colors and with exciting symbols on them, that sort of thing. Also, they can generally be cheap, unless you decide to get the really fancy ones. Cheap gifts are always good. Toy Vault plushes -- actually, there are several brands of plushes on this site. The giant microbes make good gifts for science geeks) make a great gift for a variety of geeks. I wouldn't mind having a few more myself; baby Cthulhu is lonely and really needs a baby Nyarlathotep with whom he could fight with over the control of my precious sanity. While we're on the subject of Cthulhu and my sanity, let's talk about great Lovecraftian merchandise. A collection of Lovecraft's stories makes a good gift, although some geeks (ie, ME) already have a pretty good stack of them. Related merchandise, however, grows more and more prominent and easy to find, especially on the web, and I have a lot of sources for it. My personal favorite is the HP Lovecraft Historical Society. Not only do they have some very cool stuff, like the Call of Cthulhu movie DVD and CDs of Lovecraftian holiday music, but they're also nice and usually ship the next day. With the holidays fast approaching, fast shipping is always appreciated. Another quick shipping and nice site is Kthulhu Kitsch. They have a very small selection, but it's good stuff. If you happen to be in the UK, Lovecraftiana has what looks to be a pretty good selection, including HPLHS merchandise. Actually, I saw some stuff there that I would have liked to purchase, but I hate dealing with international shipping. Surprisingly enough, I found some random Lovecraftian goodness on Etsy.com in the Geekery section, so if you're looking for a pendant with a picture of Cthulhu, or a Dark Young Christmas ornament, you may want to mosey over in that direction. T-Shirts are always much loved by geeks. You can pick up some pretty funny and rather cheap ones at such mainstream department stores as Target and Sears. Or you can get some more geek-specific, and therefor much cooler, t-shirts from various on-line sources. Offworld Designs has some nice shirts, including designs by popular artists like John Kovalic and Voltaire. They even have a clearance section, which brings me back to something that I said earlier: Cheap presents are good! Also, they seem to ship pretty quickly. Jinx shirts seem to be really, really popular with gaming geeks. I see people in my group and at game stores wearing them all the time. They kind of lost my respect when they made a Chuck Norris t-shirt, but it's still a good place to go to look for gaming pop-culture shirts. Now I shall take a break from rampant linkage to give a little talk on the subject of buying roleplaying game books. It is a great idea - IF you know what book to buy. Don't go out and just buy a random book from the roleplaying section at Barnes and Noble. You need to know your geek, know what they play, and what they already have. "Races of Eberron" is no good for a die-hard Rifts player. You have been warned. That said, I still believe that every gamer should play Earthdawn. The core rulebook makes a great present. I suggest the hard-cover edition, though, because over time the paperback has a really bad habit of losing pages. Are you tired of me yet? Ok, let's cover some things which you can easily purchase at the mall or other mainstream places. If you need to stuff a geek's stocking (wow, does that sound dirty!) You can find a lot of good stuff in the office supply section. We always, always need more pencils. Mechanical ones seem to be the most popular. Paper-clips are good, for holding character sheets together. Notebooks, for well, taking notes or writing background stories or whatever. Graph paper, for mapping out dungeons. Oh, wait, those don't fit in stockings. Moving on . . . Bookstores are a great source of geek gifts. Some of them carry a decent amount of sourcebooks these days. The manga section also tends to be quite sizable, but like gaming books, you really have to have a good idea of what to buy there. I recommend cruising the Bargain Books section. You can usually find something on weapons, martial arts, or interesting periods in history. Keep your eye out for other cool things like "The Book of Five Rings" or "The Book of the Dead" or ghost story collections or discounted fantasy art. When in doubt, book store gift cards are perfectly awesome presents. Some geeks (like ME) like funny buttons and stickers, which can be purchased at places like Hot Topic. For that matter, let me toss another link in here! I like to buy my stickers, buttons, car plaques and whatnot at StickerGiant. They have cheap and sometimes even free shipping, and they're also fast. Great for stocking stuffers. You can always go look in the toy store or department for cool plastic dragons and other such geeky things. Or you can fall back on food. It's always nice to have snacks at gaming. In closing, I'd just like to say that I hope everyone has a great holiday, that your shopping is all easily accomplished, that you do not tape yourself to any presents, and that you receive what your heart desires. Of course, if your heart desires a Playstation 3, that may take a miracle. Catch you all in the New Year!

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Copyright © 2006 By AJ Reardon E-mail AJ at: ErtheFae@aol.com Visit AJ at: www.erthefae.com