Hey, we’re Wouter and Ymke, a Belgian couple with a shared love of board games, and together we are Tabletopping. Our three kids regularly join us at the table and, unsurprisingly, all have their own ideas about what makes a good game. It keeps our gaming varied and gives us a pretty good idea of how differently the same game can land with different players. There’s probably more cardboard, dice and meeples in our house than strictly necessary, but at this point we’ve accepted that.
We’ve both been playing games since we were young, and that continued during the first years of our relationship with games like Agricola and Pandemic. Tabletopping itself started in 2015, after we somewhat impulsively decided to head to Spiel Essen and created our Instagram page along the way.
At first, we simply shared some photos of the games we were playing. People started asking questions, we started answering them, and somewhere along the way those answers became short reviews. The reviews became longer, and our little Instagram page kept growing along with them. Today, Tabletopping is one of the largest Belgian board game review accounts on Instagram, with more than 35,000 followers. Not exactly what we had in mind when we posted those first few pictures.
There was just one problem: our reviews kept getting longer and Instagram didn’t. Eventually, we needed a little more room to talk about games, and that’s how this website came to be.
Most of our gaming still happens where it always has: at home. Sometimes with our kids, sometimes with friends who drop by and quite often just the two of us. We also visit board game events whenever we get the chance, although our shelves make a fairly convincing argument that we probably don’t need to bring any more games home.
What keeps us interested in board games isn’t only what’s inside the box. It’s what happens around it. Games get people around the same table, talking, laughing, thinking and, every now and then, getting a little too competitive. In a world where screens tend to claim a lot of our attention, we like that board games give us a reason to put them aside for a while.
That’s also what we try to do with Tabletopping. We want to show you what a game is actually like at the table. How does it play? What makes it interesting? What doesn’t quite work for us? And, perhaps most importantly, who is it for? Because a good game isn’t automatically a good game for everyone.
We want modern board gaming to feel approachable, whether you’ve only just discovered there are board games beyond the ones you grew up with or you’ve been rearranging an increasingly problematic collection for years.
So, pull up a chair. Hopefully, you’ll find something here that fits your table just right.
