The Gay Sex Hockey Books (aka Game Changers)

11.01.2026

Like everyone else in the world, I watched Heated Rivalry in December and immediately became obsessed with it. The show is based on a series of m/m hockey romance novels by Rachel Reid titles Game Changers - every book follows a different hockey player finding love, but they all take place in the same universe. Initially I just wanted to read book two and six (because those are the ones that follow Shane and Ilya from the show), but I decided to also read the rest for completion's sake (Except for book one, Game Changer, which follows hockey player Scott and smoothie barista (?) Kip. Their story is an important foundation for anything else that happens, but they sound really boring. Sorry.). If you're wondering which one of these are worth it if you have a similar taste to me, this is for you! (This contains mild spoilers, but not for anything you can't already foresee happening after the first two chapters.)

General thoughts on these books:

1) These are all romance novels that read like fanfiction with the series numbers filed of, probably because at least some of them are. (Game Changers is apparently Stucky fic?) If you don't like relatively low-conflict romance-focussed fanfiction, you probably won't like these books; that isn't a value judgement but I think a good metric by which to decide whether these are for you.
2) These are the Gay Sex Hockey Books, but there's not that much sex and hockey in them. More sex than hockey, but just like with Heated Rivalry (the show) people overstate how freaky these books are.
3) Almost all of these take a heavy dip in quality around the last two to three chapters when Reid remembers a romance novel is supposed to have some sort of third-act conflict to lead up to the climax; that conflict is usually a breakup. I feel like Reid's heart isn't in the third-act breakup. They don't come fully out of nowhere (the characters spent a lot of time lamenting about the reasons they can't be together, and those reasons usually lead to the breakup), but the fight that breaks them up always does and also feels out-of-character. They also always get back together super quickly afterwards, so we don't even get to linger in the breakup agony.
4) Adding to the previous point, I feel like all of these books would drastically improve if we let the characters be a bit uglier. They have flaws, but they're always the kind that isn't really that big of a deal. Not saying these characters would be better if they were bad people or that they should be less likeable (these are romance novels after all!), but if they had some actually difficult traits we could have more impactful conflict and actual character growth.
5) Ilya is clearly Reid's favorite character: The highlight of all of these books is when Ilya shows up out of nowhere, clocks our hockey hero as queer, says something out-of-pocket but actually very sweet, and vanishes into the night.

Overall, I would say: If you liked Heated Rivalry and you like to read, these are a good choice when you want something fun and light-hearted. These can also all definitely be read as stand-alones: reading them in order gives additional context and you get some fun cameos, but I've seen some people act as if you can't read the later books without the earlier ones, and that just is plain untrue.

Book 3: Tough Guy
★★⯪☆☆

Tough Guy follows Ryan Price, an enforcer who gets traded just about every season, most recently to Toronto. Ryan Price is our titular tough guy: he's super buff and tall, he beats people up on the ice, and he also has clinical-level anxiety and is extremely shy off the ice. In Toronto, he runs into Fabian Salah, a man he temporarily lived with as a teenager. Fabian is now an aspiring musician who is openly and very visible queer. They both had crushes on each other as teens, and now this spark rekindles - the only problem is that Fabian hates hockey, and Ryan's violent job threatens to break them apart.

This book is... okay. It is sort of a nothing book. The conflict is oddly fabricated (Ryan is unhappy playing hockey; Fabian doesn't want him to play hockey - the resolution is extremely obvious from the get-go), the novel plays out beat-for-beat how you'd expect.

Every romance novel stands and falls with its characters. I love Ryan; he's my favorite lead after Shane and Ilya and the redeeming aspect of this book. I like the contrast of his tough exterior and shy and sweet personality. His anxiety sometimes makes him act in silly ways, but this is understandable. He's genuiely cute! He's someone I would want to fall in love with! The problem with his novel is Fabian. And I really wanted to like Fabian - I like that he's a gender non-conforming man who wears makeup; I like that he's openly queer and very integrated in his local community; I like his friends.

The book tells us Fabian is interesting, but I wish we got to actually see that, because beyond his queerness, there isn't really much to him. He wants to be a musician, and he starts the novel already filling out concerts hall and ends it filling slightly bigger concert halls without any strugge; his family is homophobic, but outside of one scene at christmas this doesn't seem to weigh him down and he is perfectly content with his queerness; he hates hockey and the narrative validates him in this.

I think this book would have been a lot better if Ryan liked playing Hockey so that there is an actual question for him to be conflicted about: Hockey or Fabian? And we can still have the discussions about violence, homphobia, and substance abuse issues in the sport, which are topics this book sort-of-touches, and we could have some character growth in the process.

Also, this book should just have been freakier. You've got a main character who beats people up for a job in a way that is even not directly unethical because that's what Professional Hockey is apparently all about, and you describe how he bruises his bloodied knuckles bashing someone's face in, and you aren't even a little bit horny about it? Come on. Coward's way out.

Book 4: Common Goal
★★★⯪☆

Common Goal follows New York goaltender Eric Bennett and grad student and bartender Kyle Swift. Eric is 41 (although the book often acts like he's in his 60s already) and recently divorced his wife of 20+ years. This is the perfect opportunity for him to explore his bisexuality, but he struggles to find his way in the queer dating scene. When he meets Kyle, the two quickly become friends and Kyle offers to be Eric's "gay guide" - which eventually ends with