Staff home favorites that are on sale for Black Friday right now

Whenever Verge staff is asked to describe their favorite games, smart tech, desktop accessories, or whatever, they are free to talk about things they recently bought, things they picked up 10 years ago, or things they’ve had sitting around their house for decades. Inevitably, though, some of the items have popped up in Black Friday sales. We thought we’d offer a curated list of a few of them.

Jennifer Pattison Tuohy, reviewer

Finding a board game that will entertain a 13-year-old girl, a 16-year-old boy, my partner, and me is a challenge. We’ve cycled through all the classics as well as newer options — Carcassonne, Ticket to Ride, Catan, and more. While these are all great, inevitably one of the group develops a passionate dislike for the game (usually after a few too many losses) and it drops off our rotation. However, Evolution: Oceans has been a constant crowd-pleaser for over six months now, and we all love it. 

Part of the Evolution series from NorthStar Game Studio, Oceans is a beautiful, complicated, compelling, and challenging strategy game. You create new species to fill your ocean and fight to develop them and keep them alive using adaptations and abilities such as schooling and speed, tentacles, and parasitic abilities. 

Cards give you your powers, and these are gorgeously illustrated, making this game a visual feast. It does have a fairly steep learning curve, but once you get going and the strategies unfold, the gameplay is smooth and relatively fast-paced. There is a fair amount of player-to-player interaction, so we’ve had a couple of temper tantrums, but nothing big enough to knock this one off our family’s top spot… at least not yet.

Victoria Song, senior reviewer

At my last apartment, I kept all my plants in the windowsill, and whenever we opened the window for some fresh air, we got fungus gnats. Fungus gnats love overwatered soil, so once you’ve gotten rid of them, you’ve got to be careful and diligent about your watering schedule. For that, I got myself a Gouevn soil moisture meter to teach myself how to properly water my plants. I’ve properly vanquished my fungus gnat issue, but with these two tools, I’m always prepared in case there’s ever another infestation.

Wes Davis, weekend editor

Most of the things I own are, frankly, just unreliable enough to be annoying. But I do love the Meross Smart Wi-Fi Garage Door Opener for HomeKit. And my love for it isn’t just about its rock-solid performance — it’s because, as far as I can tell, it’s compatible with almost any garage door opener on the market and across time itself. I don’t think that’s an exaggeration, either. The chunky mustard yellow all-metal box that cranks my garage door open — the Model 455 by Automatic Doorman — was made, by my loose estimation, sometime between the fall of Rome and 1975. 

But Meross’ adapter was $30 — and to my amazement, after a very simple installation, it worked and continues to do so almost every time I need it to. Best of all, I don’t have to carry the chunky remote with me on my bike when I leave because I can just talk into my Apple Watch when I return and coast right in. 

Sean Hollister, senior editor

The single fastest and most reliable device in my entire smart home… is whichever dumb-as-a-brick appliance I plug into this tiny box. Seriously, I’m pretty sure the Kasa Smart Wi-Fi Plug Mini is the only smart home device that’s never let me down. Whether it’s a string of Christmas lights, a garage freezer, a hot water recirculation pump, a humidifier, a bedside lamp, or a fan — all genuine examples from my home — I always know Alexa or Google or Siri or Home Assistant will flick that virtual switch in an instant and / or follow my programmed schedule.

Plus, I get some energy savings, too! My Brother printer used to draw 4W all day every day; now, I only spend 0.5–0.8W for the Smart Plug Mini it’s plugged into. I just wish TP-Link stopped making so many new versions so I could tell you which one to buy. I do know I’d have bought these energy-monitoring ones if I’d had a little more foresight. 

Jess Weatherbed, news writer

When the aesthetic hill you’ve chosen to die on is as gaudy as mine, the traditional red-and-green holiday string lights that get plonked on the tree each year are, frankly, not obnoxious enough. I’ve been using Twinkly Strings instead for the last few years, which are considerably more expensive but provide a great deal more creative freedom. These smart LED lights are fully customizable, enabling you to pick which colors work best for your decorative needs, and are compatible with Alexa and Google smart home setups.

In my flat, they stay out year-round. When not adorning a tree, I hook them to the ceiling of my office to use as ambient mood lighting, which I’ve programmed to turn on automatically at sundown each day. You can control most features via voice commands with Alexa, including switching the lights on or off and adjusting what color the lights are set to. The Twinkly companion app provides more control over color combinations and lighting patterns, but gamers can also integrate them with Razer Synapse if they want to match them with the RGB accessories in their PC setup.

Christopher Grant, group publisher, The Verge and Polygon

I was already out of love with my 2018 Nest Doorbell when Google raised the price of the video cloud storage subscription. That subscription, which was already unpalatable at $50 a year — it only captured “events” and not full 24/7 video, and even then only stored those events for 30 days — was going to increase by a whopping 60 percent. Raising prices this high without anything to show for it except a clumsy explanation of “inflation and tax increases,” despite the well-understood maxim that storage costs go down over time, was just the push I needed, so after spending some time on the Home Assistant forums, I settled on the Reolink Video Doorbell PoE camera. 

On sale for less than the cost of a single year of Google’s new subscription, the Reolink impresses with much better video quality, PoE support, so no batteries or Wi-Fi issues to worry about (though a Wi-Fi version is available if that works better for you), and support for local storage via an SD card (imagine!) or network support via the ONVIF standard. It integrates directly into Home Assistant, no Reolink account necessary, and is generally just a much better product. I wish I made the switch years ago. 

Barbara Krasnoff, reviews editor

A couple of years ago, I realized that my mother’s memory was starting to get a little wonky and that she would need reminding about appointments, medication, and other things. The answer turned out to be Amazon’s Echo Show 8. I bought her one for the living room, and not only did it remind her to take her pills but also she could listen to music, see photos, and maybe even do an occasional face-to-face call. 

However, I soon realized that wasn’t enough. I needed to know that she could contact me in an emergency no matter where she was in her apartment, but she refused to wear one of those old-fashioned “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up” alert system gadgets. We went back and forth — until finally, as luck would have it, her ancient clock radio (if you don’t know what a clock radio is, look it up under “old technology”) finally gave up the ghost, and I was able to get her an Amazon Echo Dot with Clock (which is, unfortunately, being phased out). My mother loved it — she could not only see what time it was but also ask what the weather was or play a favorite song, right from her bedroom. And I was happy because, between the Dot and the Show, she could yell, “Call Barbara” anywhere in the apartment — including the bathroom — and it would hear her. It was a win-win.

Allison Johnson, reviewer

I’m at the phone stand. I’m at the wallet. I’m at the combination phone stand and wallet. 

An accessory that does two jobs instead of one is the best kind of phone accessory in my book, like Moft’s phone stand and wallet. It sticks to the back of your phone, either by MagSafe or adhesive, and fits three of your most precious ID or payment cards. It’s pretty low-profile when it’s closed, but you unfold it origami-style when you need a card or want to use it as a stand. Magnets inside keep it open or closed, and it’s sturdy enough to prop your phone up either horizontally or vertically. 

You can also open it partway and put your hand through the loop to use it as a phone grip. That’s like, two and a half jobs out of one accessory, plus it looks nice. Not a bad deal.

Christopher Grant, group publisher, Polygon and The Verge

About 90 percent of our quarantine meals were made in an Instant Pot. There’s just no time to do anything anymore, and we can make large amounts of healthy food, with little attention, and have leftovers. I liked it before, but now I’m ready to build a shrine to it.  

Barbara Krasnoff, reviews editor

We use a lot of garlic in my household, and traditional garlic presses never did it for us — they usually produced a messy, slushy paste. A friend of ours introduced us to the garlic rocker, which is not only fun to play with but produces beautifully minced pieces of garlic, perfect for sautéing and other uses.