10 gateway games that make great gifts for the non-gamers in your life

To play video games is to know the frustration of having dear friends and loved ones who don’t share the same enthusiasm for your hobby.

You have options though. Sure, your non-gaming bestie may never sit down for a rousing two hours of Call of Duty or Fortnite hijinx, but video games come in all shapes and sizes. You just have to choose wisely.

The trick is to ease people in. For someone who’s never played a modern video game, even the act of holding a standard twin-thumbstick controller can be confusing. This rundown of gift ideas is meant to help you find the perfect entry point for all the non-gamers in your life.

This one is obvious. Too obvious, maybe, but any list of games that purports to offer entry points for the non-gamers in our lives is incomplete if it leaves out Minecraft.

That’s not to say Mojang’s global sensation is an easy game, however. The controls mirror those of many other modern first-person games. The range of things you can do — from exploring to building to tinkering with Redstone “electronics” — is staggering. And for all its virtues, Minecraft isn’t always great about teaching new players.

But it’s available on just about every gaming-friendly machine you can think of and it lets different players team up across many of those platforms. You can offset the missing tutorial by just hopping in and playing with your gift recipient — that’s why you gave this gift in the first place, right?

Price: Varies by platform

Image: fantasy flight games

I know what you’re thinking: This isn’t a video game.

True! But it’s based on a video game. And as board games based on video games go, this one is particularly true to the underlying mechanics of the popular post-apocalyptic role-playing game series from Bethesda Softworks. If Fallout 4 is too much for your favorite non-gamer (probably the case), Fallout: The Board Game is a great entry point.

It’s still not easy. The instructions aren’t always clear and there are lots of rules to nail down. Your friend would probably benefit from watching a Let’s Play on YouTube before setting up their own game. Alternatively, if your gift recipient is already a fan of tabletop games, you might want to check out the more complicated Fallout: Wasteland Warfare.

Price: $47.96 on Amazon

There was a time when Telltale Games had a de facto monopoly on choice-driven story games. Then, a little French studio called Dontnod came along with Life Is Strange.

The original story is set against the backdrop of Arcadia Bay, a fictional Oregon town where quirky people live and strange things happen. There are some supernatural elements, but Life Is Strange really sings around its characters: You play twelfth grader Maxine “Max” Caulfield as she deals with some heavy shit during the last days of high school.

The story unfolds over the course of five episodes, and the choices made along the way influence events large and small all throughout. Much like Minecraft, Life Is Strange can be played on pretty much any modern gaming-capable machine. 

Also: Season 2 just launched. So your gift recipient has somewhere to turn when they finish the first season and end up hooked.

Price: Varies by platform (Android/iOS versions also available) 

There’s no messing with a classic.

In Portal, Valve took the first-person shooter genre and flipped it, delivering a physics-driven puzzle game built on similar mechanics. Portal 2 is more of the same in some ways, but it introduces a number of new gameplay wrinkles — including a whole set of cooperative challenges engineered specifically for two players.

Portal 2‘s puzzles all center around the game’s one and only gun, a non-lethal tool that shoots out blue and orange portals that connect to one another. The idea is you use these portals to get around obstacles and move otherwise motionless objects, though the process of doing so is rarely simple.

The biggest challenge with Portal 2 at this point is finding a way to play it. The game has never been released on mobile and it’s not available on modern consoles. To play, your gift recipient will need a PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, or a Mac/Windows PC beefy enough to run a seven-year-old game.

Price: $9.99

The original virtual pet is back.

Once a hot ’90s fad, Bandai resurrected the egg-shaped keychain toy in 2017. It’s a simple premise: A little (digital) critter lives inside each small Tamagotchi unit and it’s up to you to keep your bleeping friend happy, healthy, and fed.

You accomplish this by interacting with the three buttons situated below the pint-sized screen. Bandai’s revived Tamagotchi makes it generally easier to keep your critter alive, but the new version is largely the same as the ’90s originals.

Price: $19.99

The best part of cooking is the food. But the best part of cooperative cooking, as anyone who’s seen Hell’s Kitchen knows, is the incoherent shouting between kitchen-occupying friends.

Overcooked 2 turns the idea of cooperative cooking into a literal video game. Up to four players move busily around a virtual kitchen’s different prep stations — hopefully in harmony — as they work together to prepare meals. It’s never that simple, of course; demanding dinner guests, changing environmental conditions, and more complicate the cooking at every step.

It’s riotous fun when you can get a group together. It’s also one of the more limited availability options on this list; Overcooked 2 is only available on PlayStation 4, Switch, Windows, and Xbox One. This may work better as a gift to yourself that you then use to lure your non-gaming friends into playing.

Price: $24.99

Another tabletop game, though this one is very different from Fallout.

Dropmix is a music-based board game created by Harmonix, the studio behind Rock Band. There’s an app component to it, as players create musical mash-ups using NFC-chipped cards and a specially designed board.

There are several different ways to play, but the music-making side of DropMix is the real draw. As cards are arrayed on to the game board, the app reads each one and uses some behind the scenes magic to mix together snippets from the song represented on each card. The end result sounds like it could’ve come from an actual pro DJ, and the app even lets you share your creations on social media.

Price: $60.92 on Amazon

You know that thing where you’re watching a horror movie and the dumbass soon-to-be slasher victim hides under the bed when there’s a perfectly good door to escape through five feet away? Until Dawn lets you see what happens when you choose the door.

The makeup of the gameplay is similar to Life Is Strange in that much of what you do involves exploring and talking to people. But the cast of Until Dawn is larger, and they’re all under your control at different points. The choices you make dictate whether many of them live or die.

Wrapping around all of this is a sharply written horror story with some extremely well-executed twists and an all-star cast. The only drawback? It’s PlayStation 4 only.

Price: $19.75 on Amazon

Virtual reality hasn’t really caught on yet, in large part because of the hardware. You either need a fancy, not-cheap computer to pair with the not-cheap tech from Oculus or HTC, or you need a smartphone and a willingness to murder the battery of said smartphone when you plug it into a supported mobile headset.

Oculus Quest is a game-changer. It’s a fully self-contained VR system, much like the Oculus Go, but one that uses four positional cameras to keep track of your movements in a virtual space. It offers an experience that’s roughly on par with what you’d get from a PC-connected rig.

There’s just one catch: Oculus Quest isn’t out yet, and it won’t be here until the spring of 2019. (It’s also pricey, at $399.) Pre-orders aren’t even open yet. So this is more of an I.O.U. But for the VR-curious in your life, everything we’ve seen so far tells us it’ll be worth the wait.

Price: $399

Image: LILI SAMS/MASHABLE

Why gift one game when you can gift more than 20 in one go, and with the hardware they’ll need to run?

The NES Classic (and its one-year-newer sibling, the SNES Classic) each pack a set of classic Nintendo games into a single piece of hardware, modeled to look like a pint-sized version of the old-school gaming console it’s named for. Whichever you choose, you’re getting a boatload of games, mixed between deep cuts and proper classics.

Both of these items were hard to find for a long time after they launched. But Nintendo noted the intense interest around them and upped shipments dramatically. Don’t settle for premium pricing from a third-party seller; you should be able to find them both at their MSRP if you look hard enough.

Price: $60 for NES Classic; $80 for SNES Classic