10 Essential(ish) Gadgets for Your Super Bowl Sunday Party

Hot dogs are a sporting event staple, and certainly deserve a place next to nachos, chips, and wings at your party. Instead of firing up the barbecue in the middle of February, let this $70 steamer from Starfrit do all the work. In just 12 minutes it can heat a dozen dogs and buns and then keep them warm during the game, even well into overtime, and the only additional ingredient you need to add is water.

Want your guests to remember your epic Super Bowl Sunday spread instead of the game? Nothing will leave a more indelible impression on football fans than a cascading fountain of ranch dip or melted nacho cheese—or maybe even both. Why make your guests choose? This stainless steel multi-tier fountain is $80 well spent because there’s no limit to the types of melted consumables that can cascade down like a delicious waterfall, and there’s no law that says you need to throw a party before you can fire it up.

A good speaker setup is a critical part of a successful Super Bowl party when you’ve got a house full of loud people talking and excitedly cheering on their team, but a soundbar and a few dinky satellite speakers around the room aren’t going to cut it. Love Sac, a real company that 100% exists, now sells a sofa line called the StealthTech Sound + Charge that features front and rear-firing Harmon Kardon speakers, as well as a center channel and sub-woofers, hidden away inside the furniture itself. It not only fills a room with sound, but also lets anyone sitting on the sofa feels like they’re part of the game. While completely customizable, a base configuration starts at around $3,000.

Unless you want everyone texting about you behind your back on Monday morning, don’t be the person who invites a house full of people over to watch the big game but then serves room temperature nacho chips straight out of the bag. Do you know why nachos always taste better at stadiums, arenas, and movie theaters? It’s because they heat the chips first. For $300 this Servalot Chip Warmer will do the same for you using a 61-watt heating element. It’s capacious enough for 10 pounds of chips that will be impossible to resist as glass walls show off that warm yellow glow of crispy sodium.

It’s not a bad idea to have a backup plan or two if the big game ends up being a complete blowout and your guests lose interest. Breaking out the Scrabble board will have everyone leaving in minutes, but with this 2 Minute Drill NFL arcade machine, you may actually have a hard time getting people to go home. Players throw real footballs at targets that randomly pop out or one of three different sized scoring holes. At $12,000 it’s not the cheapest game day entertainment, but with a working quarter slot, you might just break even after a decade of Super Bowls.

If you’re throwing a proper Super Bowl party, by mid-morning on Sunday your kitchen fridge should be packed full of snacks, leaving very little room for drinks. What you need is a smaller fridge dedicated to drinks that’s also TV adjacent so that no one has to risk missing the game or a single commercial when they get thirsty. This 3.5 cubic foot beverage cooler from Igloo should fit the bill with capacity for up to 135 12-ounce cans, a double-pane glass door putting its contents on display, interior LED lighting, and a $450 price tag.

Bringing friends and family to the big game is an expensive proposition; it’s a lot cheaper to bring the game to them, and for as little as $700 that Super Bowl at-home experience can even include souvenir t-shirts blasted out of a cannon. The Micro-Mini from TShirtGun.com is a miniaturized version of the promotional weapons used in stadiums across the country, and while it draws a bit less power from an attached CO2 tank, it should still have enough kick to reach the extra folding chairs you had to set up behind the sofa.

The Super Bowl is the one time of year where your dad isn’t militantly muting commercials while glued to the TV, but ensuring the remote doesn’t go missing is still critical for when the halftime show gets under way. The easiest way to keep tabs on the clicker is to temporarily upgrade it to football-shaped universal remote that also includes functionality for something called a VCR... must be some new streaming service. Once a popular way to sell sports magazines, football remotes are harder to come by today, but you can find them on eBay for about $15.

There’s no getting around that we’re still in the middle of a pandemic, and can you really trust all your guests to properly wash their hands after a bathroom break before digging back into the snack bowl? Absolutely not, so swap out the hand sanitizer for this automatic hand-washing station where guests simply have to stick their hands inside and wait while soap is applied and then rinsed off, ensuring proper hygiene is the real MVP of the night.

A house full of people on Sunday night means a house full of dirt and filth on Monday morning. Assuming you didn’t stay up all night cleaning and haven’t taken a sick day on Monday, you’ll be in desperate need of help, and Roborock’s new S7 MaxV Ultra robovac will at least make sure your floors end up spotless. It’s not only an autonomous vacuum with intelligent navigation and object avoidance capabilities, it’s a mop, too, ensuring dropped piles of dried salsa get quickly dealt with. At the end of its cycle it returns to its charging dock all on its own where its batteries are topped off, it’s emptied, and its mopping head is automatically cleaned. The only thing left on your to-do list is a mountain of dishes.