December, 2024

A new look for a new season

It’s our 5th season here at White Elephant Online, and we’ve been busy in the workshop to bring you a fully redesigned platform this holiday season!  

New Gift Boxes and Wrapping

You’ll see completely new gift box designs and wrapping paper choices when you submit a gift.  There are more than 250 new combinations to choose from!

New Backgrounds

We’ve retired our old photo backgrounds in favor of five brand new illustrated options that capture the spirit and fun of the holiday season.

New Game Interface

We’ve moved a few things around to make it even more intuitive and to make sure the focus is on the exciting part: opening and stealing gifts!

You can also expect more of the little delights you love including new gifs and new music to listen to during your gift exchange.

November 26, 2023

One of our most requested features is finally here! The ability to play festive music during your game.

This new feature comes in two forms:

#1 Spotify Integration

If you have a Spotify account, you can login and subsequently choose any Spotify playlist to play during your game. To make it easy, we’ve pre-selected 6 popular holiday playlists for you to choose from, or you can choose “Custom” and paste any playlist or album you’d like!

#2 Free White Elephant Online Playlist

If you don’t have a Spotify account (or don’t want to bother with it), we’ve provided a free playlist of light instrumental traditional Christmas songs you can use!

Whichever option you choose, the playlist will show on the game screen for you to play before, during and after your game is complete. (Just make sure to share it with your audience via your video call).

Other Recent Updates:

• New Background option “Sleigh Bells”

• New Gifs

November 10, 2022

At White Elephant Online we’re always looking for ways to make the game you love even more fun. Today we’re introducing a new game-play option: a bonus “Swap” round. At the end of normal game-play, once everyone has a gift, each player will get one more chance to swap their gift for the one they love. It’s great for giving everyone an extra chance to leave the game happy with their gift, and also provides additional play-time if you have a smaller group that wants to keep going. This is a variation we’ve seen requested a lot, and we’re excited to roll it out today! Learn more about how this works here.

October 21, 2022

One of our most requested features has landed on the site in time for the 2022 holiday gift exchange season: address storage! You can now chose to add an address to a game for easy, automated sharing once your game has been completed. This eliminates the need to reach out after the game to gather addresses and means you can get your gift even quicker. You can read all about the details here.

December 2, 2021

Here’s an update on a few of the great things we’ve rolled out over the past month

New Backgrounds

We’ve rolled out 6 new background options for your game. Choose the fun & festive background that best matches your group!

New Gift Wrap Options

Express your individuality with hundreds of new gift-wrap combination, including new boxes, colors and a new ‘size’ option!

New Game Results Export

Are you in charge of distributing all the gifts, or want to easily see who won what so you can followup with your team? Now you can easily export a CSV report of the game results on the end-game screen.

And more!

• Gifts are now randomized on the table, so people can’t tell from the “Recent Group Activity” who submitted which gift

• The Recent Group Activity now has emojis

• We’ve added more fun GIFS to show during game-play

October 26 2021

We’ve released a whole bunch of new stuff, with more coming for this holiday season.

Amazon now automated when submitting a gift

When you submit a gift, you can simply post the URL from your favorite retailers, and we’ll automatically grab the name & image. There are a few we’re still working on, but this now works on Amazon, Target, Walmart, Etsy, Best Buy, and hundreds more.

Overall Enhanced Experience

Based on your feedback to we’ve made a number of updates make the overall experience more pleasurable! These include:

• Revamped Dashboard to get you what you need quicker

• A new screen when starting a game that explains how the site works to all participants. This makes it easier for the Game Lead to get everyone on the same page on how the game will go, and what’s expected of them.

• During Game Play:

  • Bigger images & text so it's easier to see which gift you opened (especially on a shared screen)

  • Larger area for the "Gifts to Steal" section, so it's easier to view with a lot of gifts

  • "Gifts to Steal" section now searchable

New Gift Distribution option

We offer a variety of ways for teams to distribute gifts once the game is over. Based on feedback from you, with this release we’ve split option #5 (Game organizer handles distribution) into two options:

• Game organizer handles distribution (Organizer Pays)

• Game organizer handles distribution (Player Pays)

This way you can make it clearer whether the company is paying, or whether individual participants must send money to the central organizer.

Hosts don’t need to participate

Previously, the Game Lead (or host) was required to also participate in the event by submitting & choosing a gift. To give more flexibility to organizations, we’ve enhanced it so the Game Lead can simply host the game, without participating.

Single Sign-on with Google Accounts

Have a gmail account? Easily sign up and login using single sign-on, making it easier to access your White Elephant games, without remembering a separate password.

 July 11 2021

Summer Background

White Elephant isn’t just for the holidays (ever heard of Christmas in July?) so we’ve introduced a new summer-themed game background. Create a new game to see what it looks like! If you prefer our classic winter-theme, you can always switch back to that.

Single Sign-on with Microsoft Accounts

Do you have an Outlook or Hotmail account? Now you can use that to login to White Elephant Online! This will make it easier to signup and access your White Elephant games, without remembering a separate password. Coming soon: we’re doing the same for Gmail and Facebook.

New Pricing

Those of you who played in the 2020 holiday season know we offered our Standard game for a flat-fee of $99. This year, we’re making the pricing even more reasonable by offering different packages based on the number of players you have. This way smaller teams can save money, while larger teams can still get incredible value, creating a memorable and fun activity for a fraction of the cost of other events. We’re also still offering a free version for small groups of friends and family. You can see the full pricing here.