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Best White Elephant Gifts for People Who Love Board Games

Short answer: White elephant gifts should be funny, cheap enough to not feel like a real present, and good enough that people actually fight over them. A boxed party game hits all three — and Eat Your Neighbor is built specifically to be the gift someone steals three times.

Most white elephant gift exchanges have a price cap around $25 and a simple rule: bring something people will actually want to steal. Gag gifts are funny once. A genuinely good, funny party game gets stolen repeatedly, which is the entire point of the game-within-the-game.

What actually makes a good white elephant gift

The best white elephant board game gifts share three things: they're funny to unwrap in front of a group, they're cheap enough to not feel like you spent real money, and they're good enough that the next person in line actually wants to steal it instead of taking a new box.

Our pick: Eat Your Neighbor

A card, dice, and board game for 2–6 players where everyone raises a family of small creatures called Nugs, and the whole table is trying to get yours eaten, buried, or run over first. It plays in 20–30 minutes, which matters at a party where people are also eating, drinking, and doing a gift exchange at the same time — nobody wants to explain a 90-minute rulebook between courses. See sample cards →

Other white elephant traditions worth stealing (pun intended)

If you want to make the exchange itself funnier, not just the gifts:

  • White Elephant Bingo — players mark off a card as things happen during the exchange (a new gift gets opened, a steal happens, someone argues about the rules).
  • The Auction Game — everyone bids on gifts using fake currency instead of the standard steal-based turn order.
  • Themed White Elephant — everyone brings a gift that fits a specific theme (ugliest sweater-adjacent item, weirdest kitchen gadget, etc.), which works especially well if the theme is "something your terrible neighbor would actually own."

The one rule that matters most

Keep the price cap low and the fun-to-actually-steal ratio high. A $12–20 party game beats a $25 candle almost every time, because a candle doesn't get stolen three times before the exchange ends.

Eat Your Neighbor is launching soon on Kickstarter. Sign up now — before your neighbors do.