Rolling for Initiative is a weekly column by Scott Thorne, PhD, owner of Castle Perilous Games & Books in Carbondale, Illinois and instructor in marketing at Southeast Missouri State University.  This week, Thorne reveals his picks for gift items to stock for the holidays.

ICv2 is getting an early jump on the gift giving season this week so here are a few things we will point our customers towards.  Happily, there are no Magic: The Gathering gift boxes this year as we are still sitting on boxes of The Lord of the Rings gift sets I thought would be an easy holiday sell last year.  Live and learn.

I would suggest the Dungeons & Dragons 2024 Player’s Handbook and Dungeon Master’s Guides but, based on the sales we saw last week and numbers I have heard reported from other stores, I expect everyone who wanted a copy will have purchased one by the time Christmas arrives.  Similarly, Magic: The Gathering - Foundations does not appear to lend itself well to gift giving.  So, unless you want to make a Magic player really happy and spend several hundreds of dollars on an older sealed box of Magic, I suggest the following instead:

Tome of Beasts.  Kobold Press has a very well-designed set of creature compendiums compatible with D&D 5E, including the Tome of Beasts, Tome of Beasts II, Tomb of Beasts III and the Creature Codex.  I have found that most D&D players and dungeon-masters focus on the official Wizards of the Coast books and have overlooked these gems.  We stock them and sell them steadily, and the hard covers make a great gift.

Storytellers Dictionary and Thesaurus.  Both published by Troll Lord Games, I've lost track of the number of these we have sold over the years to both aspiring and established writers.  The Dictionary provides definitions of hundreds of words (related to flora, fauna, geography, social organizations, etc.) while the Thesaurus offers alternative words to liven up storytelling.  Most of our distributors have dropped Troll Lord Games, but we still order sets of these direct several times a year, though we have found the Thesaurus outsells the Dictionary by a factor of four.

Heroscape and HeroQuest.  Christmas is the perfect time to spend a lot of money on a gift and what better type of gift for a board gamer, especially one whose tastes run to fantasy than one of these big boxes.  The size alone will make an impact under the tree.

One Piece Card Game.  The One Piece CG is almost impossible to find in stores, indicating there is still strong demand for it.  We have had customers driving in from over an hour away to get some of our packs because stores closer to them had none and they REALLY wanted some.  Interest in One Piece shows no current signs of slowing down, unlike Disney Lorcana and Star Wars Unlimited so a box of booster packs would make a great gift.

Catan.  There are quite a few expansions for the base Catan game as well as additional campaigns to play with it and additional versions such as Starfarers, New Energies, Histories, Duel, etc.  We have found a large number of Catan players purchase the main game, come back for the 5-6 player expansion and then are surprised to find all of the additional add-ons and variants players can incorporate into the main set, or play on their own.  It is quite likely that a Catan player will not have variants or other versions of the game, making it a nice gift.

Comments? Your suggestions? Send them to castleperilousgames@gmail.com.

The opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.

For more great suggestions for gifts merchandising this holiday season, click here.