Happy Holidays, Renegades!

I love the holidays because I love gifting (okay yes and getting) presents! In my need to gamify everything I started a tradition a few years ago of wrapping presents in a way that might vaguely hint at what’s inside. It lets me be creative with wrapping and it’s a great conversation starter if you put presents out early.

I wanted to share this tradition with you all, either to make you laugh or to give you an idea of how to wrap your own presents this season!

Step one is gathering your supplies. On top of the games you’ll be wrapping, we've got wrapping paper, various bows, glue and tape, packing paper (not pictured) , and a box cutter/gift wrap blade. 

.

The first game we’ll be wrapping is The Vale of Eternity- this award winning game features a magical and fantastical world with spirits, monsters, and gods. So I wanted to wrap this one up like a dragon.

Since I opted for a sleeping, curled up dragon, I started by wrapping the packing paper around the game and shaping a dragon head with tape.

Then I uncurled the dragon to wrap it in festive paper, wrapped it back around the box, and then carefully wrapped the box up so the game was entirely covered but the dragon’s head was still unwrapped.

Then we wrap the dragon’s head and use some wrapping paper scraps to create some little horns.

Some dragons have antennae, or very skinny horns, probably.

Once the dragon was all wrapped and had horns, I cut out some closed eyes, a set of wrapping paper wings, and then topped it off with a bow in the middle.

.

And voila! There you have a sleeping dragon. Ready to be unwrapped to reveal the goodies inside.

The second gift we’re wrapping is an indulgence of my childhood desire to get a pony. I grabbed the My Little Pony: Adventures in Equestria Deck-Building Game Starter Bundle so that I can rope more friends into playing with me. For this specific gift I’m just wrapping the boxes and wrapping the meeples separately in a standard way.

With the three boxes wrapped it’s time to assemble the pony!

I used the two smaller expansion boxes as the legs, with the larger box acting as the body.

Not very pony-like yet.

Here’s how these become a pony- create a cylinder of wrapping paper for the head, you’ll tape that down and then fold the open end to create some pony ears.

Getting closer…

Then you’ll make a muzzle out of another cylinder and tape that to the front of our pony’s face. Once you have that base you can easily grab some trailing ribbon gift bows to use as the tail and mane of our little pony.

And there we have a pony!

Our final gift is potentially the most dastardly, not only for our gift receiver but also for us as the gift wrapper.

I love the Tea Dragon Society game and when I got my hands on Autumn Harvest I knew I wanted to be a little silly with its wrapping.

We have a lot of old textbooks at our place and since we’re using most of them as doorstops I thought this would be a fun way to give this one a new life.

The first step is of course, finding your book- preferably a hardcover and definitely thicker than the game you’ll be wrapping.

We have another 3 copies of this book because they change it nearly every year.

Next, I’d recommend following a tutorial on how to hollow out a book, this is a bit of a process but in the end you’ll have a book with a space in the middle that you can subsequently use to store other things in the future!

Slide your game right into the slot you’ve made and if you wanted to you could stop here (but maybe taping the book closed so no one tries to open it before the time is right).

There’s just a little wiggle room, enough for some interesting sounds if you’re a gift shaker like me.

However if you want to take it a step further, you can wrap the book itself and watch the giftee’s reaction to getting an unexpected book before they look inside.

With all of our gifts wrapped up beautifully and uniquely, you’ll be sure to bring some holiday delight to the pile of regularly wrapped presents.

Happy Holidays, and Happy Gaming!