The best deals on Verge staff favorite gadgets for Amazon Prime Day

Amazon’s fall Prime Day event is underway! For more deals we recommend across all categories, check out our full roundup.

Every month or so, we like to ask our staff about their favorite stuff — whether it’s board games, smart tech, or kitchen gadgets. And the results are usually very different, very interesting, and a lot of fun.

Since Amazon is currently pushing a lot of deals through its current Prime Day sales, we looked through some of our recent “favorites” articles and found deals on a lot of the devices we like. So we thought we’d list a few in case you have read about them in the past and thought, well, that sort of sounds good, but it’s a bit pricey. (Or — that’s pretty cheap, but maybe I’ll wait until the price goes down some more…)

So here are some of our staff’s most-liked games, gear and gadgets.

Becca Farsace, senior producer

The best part about the game Splendor is taking a moment to look around and watch your friends thinking really, really hard. This is a board game that has no board, just cards and chips, where the objective is to collect gems and acquire capital and property. It is best played with three to five people on a large table. And it involves a whole lot of strategizing, thinking, and endlessly scanning cards. This makes for great thinking faces!

I ditched the box for a small pouch and now bring this game to most bar hangs. And when I’m at home, I find it best when paired with a long playlist that you won’t have to spend any extra mental strength thinking about. 

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.

Jennifer Pattison Tuohy, reviewer

Don’t you hate it when you come home during a rainstorm and your sprinklers are running? What a waste of water! With a smart sprinkler controller, you can avoid this kind of insult to Mother Earth. I’ve used a Rachio Smart Sprinkler Controller for a few years now, and it reliably adjusts my irrigation system to not run before, during, or after a rainstorm, even adapting based on the amount of rain that falls. The Wi-Fi-connected system uses local weather data, so I do have to keep an eye on it; if the forecast calls for an inch of rain but we only get a sprinkle, my garden might go thirsty. But its easy-to-use app makes this adjustment something I can do from the comfort of my couch. It’s a lot like using a smart thermostat and just as satisfying in terms of feeling good about saving precious resources (and money).

Wes Davis, weekend news editor

Most of the things I own are, frankly, just unreliable enough to be annoying. All except for one or two — and of those, the one I love most of all is 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. 

Victoria Song, senior reviewer

I always lose my keys. I must open the Find My app every single time I need to leave the house to find them. It’s worse when I go for a run because it means having to stuff them in a running belt, pocket, or worst of all — my sports bra. So installing the Nest x Yale Lock has been a game-changer for me.

For runs and walks, I can head out the door with nothing but my headphones and smartwatch. It’s so freeing! Same for just leaving my house to do literally anything. My spouse and I have the questionable habit of listening to scary true crime podcasts right before bed. That used to mean playing rock, paper, scissors to see which of us had to run down three flights of stairs to check if the door was locked. Not anymore! Now we can just ask Google Assistant or whip out the phone. I love that we can also create temporary guest passcodes for pet sitters or relatives that visit. It’s only been a few weeks, but this has been the simplest yet most high-impact quality-of-life upgrade I’ve done in a long time. 

Amelia Holowaty Krales, senior photo editor

I love a toaster oven! It’s compact, works fast, and is perfect for reheating pizza, making nachos, and yes, even toast. I use my toaster oven more than my regular oven for sure — and probably more than any other item in my kitchen. I have a pretty basic model like this one, but these days, many come with other features, like air frying and convection oven capabilities. 

Victoria Song, senior reviewer

A lot of people will tell you that rice cookers are single-use appliances meant only for rice — they’re wrong. A rice cooker is best at cooking rice, but it can do a lot of the same things as an Instant Pot. For instance, you can use it to cook hardboiled eggs or oatmeal, steam vegetables, make porridge, make one-pot meals, and even bake a cake. 

I grew up with giant 10-cup rice cookers at home, but I didn’t appreciate how versatile this appliance was until I left the country for college. A tiny two-cup rice cooker kept me fed in my cramped 250-square-foot Tokyo apartment. It was programmable, so I could wash my rice, stick it in the cooker, and know that when I woke up late for class, I could still whip up some ochazuke or oatmeal for a quick, cheap, and nutritious breakfast. (It also took the hassle out of steel-cut oats.) Whenever I had a craving for sweets, it was so easy to take pancake mix and bake a Japanese-style cheesecake for one.

I’ve since graduated to a 5.5-cup Zojirushi Micom Rice Cooker, and it’s one of the handiest tools I have for meal prepping. When I was sick I made ample use of its porridge setting to make a congee-type dish with chicken and ginger — just like my mom used to make when I was a kid. The fact that it’ll keep something warm for days, meant I could crawl out of bed, scoop out some porridge, and crawl back into bed with minimal effort. When I’m feeling lazy, I throw eggs in there, and bam — some extra hard-boiled protein. Mine also comes with a little basket, so it’s super easy to throw in veggies or steam frozen dumplings.

But what I like most is that rice cookers are more space-efficient than Instant Pots. In my kitchen, the one spot where I could fit an Instant Pot is instead occupied by a rice cooker, blender, and spoon rest. A multitasking kitchen gadget that doesn’t take over your entire counter? That’s a must if you live in a small space.

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. And it looks like a strange work of art, which means we can keep it on the counter just for show.