Holiday Hills

Holiday Hills Deep Dive

What the Community Thinks About Holiday Hills

Coverage of Holiday Hills, designed by Chris Porter and published by Chris Couch Games, agrees on one thing before opinions split: the production and Christmas theme land. Neon Gorilla's interview with the designer is the most enthusiastic take on record, with the host calling the finished game beautiful and saying it was a genuine surprise how good it turned out to be, good enough to want on the table outside the holiday season entirely. Let's Table It frames Holiday Hills as a tradition-building pick for families, pointing to a theme and component set strong enough to carry both casual players and kids to the table. Our Family Plays Games echoes that warmth, saying the game did not disappoint and praising the finished Jingle Bell Square for having real table presence once it is fully decorated.

The Dice Tower breaks from that consensus. The channel opens by admitting there are not enough big, grandiose Christmas games and credits Holiday Hills with the ambition to be one, along with a strong components budget, but the review lands at a five out of ten because the decisions underneath the theme did not hold up on replay. Where the other channels see approachable family fun, The Dice Tower sees a movement rule that confuses newcomers and a scoring structure weighted so heavily toward each player's own trees that it undercuts the interaction the theme promises. Two of these looks arrived ahead of full retail availability: Let's Table It's how-to-play was filmed with a prototype copy built from 3D-printed pieces that the video says will be replaced by screen-printed wooden components in production, and Neon Gorilla's conversation with the designer took place around a Kickstarter campaign, discussing deluxe and retail pledge pricing directly.

Core Mechanics That Define Holiday Hills

Racing Sleighs Along Two Paths

Each turn splits into moving a sleigh and then acting. Let's Table It and the how-to-play from the same channel describe choosing between a top path, which is built around collecting dice presents, and a bottom path, which is built around delivering the presents already loaded on a sleigh, with players free to move as far along the chosen path as they like up to the next cottage. Only one sleigh can occupy an action space at a time, so catching up to another player forces a choice between waiting behind them or pushing past on the street. Neon Gorilla's host describes the underlying structure as a rondel system, where the sleigh advances around a fixed track and the action space chosen determines what gets collected or unloaded. The Dice Tower calls the same movement a ratchet mechanism, since a sleigh can advance as far as a player wants on a turn but can never move backward to reclaim an opportunity it passed.

Decorating Trees to Score Cheer Points

Landing on the right spaces lets a player add ornaments, candy canes, string lights, and new trees to the shared board at Jingle Bell Square, with string lights needing two adjacent open spaces and trees able to be rotated to open one up, though a tree can no longer be rotated once a string light is attached. Let's Table It explains that a fully decorated tree scores eight points at the end of the game and a tree carrying a full set of delivered presents scores ten more, while the presents themselves pay out by majority, so the player with the most decorations on a given tree claims the highest die value there and the next-most-decorated player takes the next highest. Objective cards drawn at each cottage add a third scoring layer, rewarding decoration patterns, present colors, or string light shapes. The naughty mode changes who owns a tree entirely: instead of planting a star at setup, whichever player fills the last open decoration slot on a tree claims its star and the points that come with it, which Our Family Plays Games and Let's Table It both describe as the more tactical, mean side of the same board.

The Holiday Hills Experience

A Puzzle Wrapped in a Simple Loop

Neon Gorilla's host describes being taken aback by how simple Holiday Hills felt to pick up despite the layers built into it, framing the complexity as living entirely in the puzzle of where to place decorations rather than in a pile of rules to learn. Our Family Plays Games backs that read up, calling the game easy to learn while still carrying enough strategy in the pattern building that a table will not get bored with it. Let's Table It's teach reinforces the same accessibility, noting that a group can strip out objective cards entirely for a lighter first game or skip choosing between paths altogether to slow the game down for younger or newer players.

A Slow Build Toward a Decorated Board

Both Let's Table It and Our Family Plays Games describe the appeal of watching Jingle Bell Square fill in over a play session, with trees, string lights, and candy canes accumulating turn by turn until the board itself becomes the payoff. Let's Table It calls the finished square, decorated and ready for Christmas, one of the best things the theme delivers, and Our Family Plays Games credits that same buildup with giving the game real table presence once a session wraps. The race element adds a second texture to that build: the first sleigh back to its cottage banks bonus points from the Finish Line card, but Let's Table It notes that finishing too far ahead can cost a player the extra decorations still available to those who keep playing, so timing the return trip becomes its own decision.

What Makes Holiday Hills Stand Out

Deluxe Production and Christmas Theme

The Dice Tower opens its review by praising the components and packaging as a great job and calling out the appealing Christmas theme and art even while ultimately souring on the gameplay. Neon Gorilla's host goes further, describing the deluxe 3D trees as vibrant and awesome on sight and crediting the visuals with pulling the game onto the table in the first place. Our Family Plays Games adds that the components are solid and that a finished board matching the box art rather than disappointing it is exactly what the channel looks for in a Christmas game.

Layers of Scoring for Every Player

Reviewers point to the stack of ways Holiday Hills pays out points as a strength as much as a complication. Objective cards, tree decoration bonuses, present majorities, and Finish Line points all run at once, and Our Family Plays Games highlights the extra modules available on top of that base, including a Krampus-themed addition that makes the naughty mode meaner still. Let's Table It frames the naughty mode itself as a standout option for groups who want more tactical bite, since claiming a tree by completing its last slot, and being able to swap decorations already on the board, gives every turn more teeth than the cooperative-feeling nice mode.

Potential Drawbacks

A Movement Rule That Confuses

The Dice Tower's central complaint is that a game it otherwise calls not particularly complex still trips players up on the basics. The rule about choosing which path to move along, and the scoring that follows from it, confused the table enough that the reviewer calls it out by name as the source of the review's problems with the game, despite an otherwise straightforward-looking setup.

Solitaire Scoring That Limits Interaction

The same review argues that the biggest payouts in Holiday Hills come from decorating a player's own trees rather than from contesting anyone else's, which The Dice Tower says undercuts the interaction the theme seems to promise. Paired with a movement rule that lets a sleigh travel as far as it wants but never back up, the reviewer concludes the choices on a turn rarely feel tough, since moving one space or moving several rarely forces a real trade-off, leaving the turn-to-turn loop feeling repetitive over a full play.

If You Enjoy Holiday Hills

Neon Gorilla's host pointed listeners who already like tile-laying puzzles toward Holiday Hills directly, naming Cascadia and Harmonies alongside a personal favorite, Shallow Seas, as the kind of games that make someone a good fit for what Holiday Hills is doing under its Christmas theme. Our Family Plays Games placed Holiday Hills at the top of its own holiday-game shortlist, ranking it above other seasonal titles the channel had covered, including Rudolph, Jingle Bell Roll, and Santa's Workshop, when the hosts compared the crowded field of Christmas board games directly.