Make way, cable reruns and well-worn classics — a two-part YouTube actual play titled Smosh vs. Christmas has quietly become the most rewatchable holiday “movie” I’ve seen this season. Although it is essentially self-inflicted torture, as every time my 10-year-old son insists we watch it yet again, I still oblige myself to witness the delights of Smosh vanquishing various stored memories from otherwise wonderful, pleasant holiday movies past.
It’s not the sort of movie we’re used to thinking about, but it ticks all the same boxes as any year-end confection — comfort, catharsis and big laughs — by being rooted in a single teetering tower of Jenga blocks.
Created by Smosh Games, the special makes use of what is becoming a cult-favorite tabletop role-playing system, Dread: every time someone takes a dangerous action, they need to pull a block from a Jenga tower; when the tower collapses, that character is instantly dead. The result is a spirit-of-the-season horror-comedy with real stakes, performed with razor-sharp improv by an ensemble that gets both punchlines and pathos.
A Holiday Slasher With a Bow of Comedy and Seasonal Cheer
The premise is deliciously simple: four misfits come to the snow globe of a town called Kringleton, where it’s Christmas every day. They’re Hallmark walking tropes dialed up to eleven — there’s Charlie Penn, the sensitive writer; Guy Wood, the dreamboat small-town carpenter; and Scott Ornamente, the metrosexual shark, not to mention “Pop,” who seems a little Santa-adjacent. As hot cocoa competitions evolve into a sense of unease, each flirt, fib and dare causes a totemic Jenga pull. In Kringleton, even exchanging greetings can make for a lethal roll of the dice.
It’s a tonal high-wire act: half Hallmark parody, half creature feature, half improv showcase. When the tower lurches, the comedy constricts into gasp-out-loud suspense; when it stabilizes, the table flies apart into shards that play as outtakes from a holiday sketch show.
The Dread Mechanics Make Each Beat Cinematic
Dread is a tabletop role-playing game (Epidiah Ravachol / The Impossible Dream). An alternative to rolling single-use dice is placing a physical tower to represent risk. Want to succeed? Pull. Want to avoid risk? Accept failure. If the tower topples, your character is eliminated — often quite dramatically. It’s the elegance of “Everyone is John” that horror designers swear by: the audience doesn’t need to read any rules text to understand the stakes. The camera is focused on a trembling hand; the room goes quiet; viewers are complicit in the suspense.
There’s also a practical brilliance here. The tower condenses narrative into crisp beats — set up, pull, payoff — so that an actual play feels like a cinematically tight thriller. No spreadsheets, no jargon. Just gravity fulfilling the duties of destiny.
Cast Chemistry Drives Stakes and Laughs
The table is crowded with ringers: Shayne Topp, Amanda Lehan-Canto and Angela Giarratana riff off game master George Primavera while guest Nick Williams fills the ranks. Primavera’s GMing is instrumental — the pacing he wields to ride the tower’s every shudder, the rewards for taking chances and walking play on a balancing beam rather than railroading it.
What makes the special is a heartline. And as each archetype is deepened, the humor never undermines sincerity; it frames it. You begin by laughing at the tropes and end up quietly rooting for them to navigate Kringleton’s warm lights and cold shadows without knocking down this tower.
Actual Play’s Big Moment on the Biggest Screen
This is not taking place in a vacuum. Actual play has arrived, from the record-smashing animation crowdfunding of Critical Role to Dimension 20’s slickly produced seasonal arcs. Meanwhile, living-room YouTube viewing is booming; The Gauge from Nielsen has already designated the platform as the top one by TV viewing share in America, which is to say specials like this now run where holiday movies used to live — on the biggest screen in your house.
There’s a cultural agreement at play, as well. Board and party games often offer the biggest bang during the last three months, when families sit around tables together, said The NPD Group. Smosh vs. Christmas storms that instinct — the shared tension, the shared laughter — but does it for an audience that craves to share in your energy without ever leaving their couch.
Why This Seems Like a New Christmas Classic
Classics endure because they’re ritual-friendly. For this one it’s the jokes and scares you can take in again, but also how the film understands holiday emotion — melancholy underneath merriment, found family under twinkle lights, courage wrapped inside silliness. The tower’s psychology fits the season: you focus your hands, steady your breathing and try to do right with everyone watching.
You might call it a proof of concept for a certain kind of contemporary holiday programming: short, social and made to be shared and quoted, with its format rooted in making you lean forward. If your queue is due for a revamp, you have room now to toss in some deadly Jenga here with Smosh. It’s a rare Christmas watch that can prompt anger, laughter and cheering — before anyone in Bedford Falls so much as drops an ornament.
And if you’re new to TTRPGs, this is the best possible on-ramp: no lore barrier, no rulebooks, just a tower challenging you — like the season itself — to believe in miracles and keep your balance.
