About Meeple & Mat

Why this site exists

There are two kinds of board game website and neither one is written for you.

The first is the enthusiast press. The writing is often excellent and it is aimed squarely at people who already play - it discusses mechanics by name, assumes you know what a deck-builder is, and, remarkably, tends not to tell you what anything costs. Pages carrying dozens of retailer links will show you essentially no prices.

The second is general shopping content. It shows prices and knows nothing about games. It will confidently recommend a four-player box to somebody buying for a couple, because it never occurred to anyone that the number on the side of the box is a hard limit.

Meeple & Mat is the third thing: a site that shows the price and understands the constraint. Every pick here carries the publisher’s own player count, playing time and age band, plus a live price rather than a remembered one.

Who it is for

Somebody buying a board game for somebody else, who does not play board games themselves. No price anchor, no genre literacy, no way to judge whether a game will actually get played once the wrapping is off - and often under time pressure and mildly worried about getting it wrong.

That reader shapes every decision here. It is why the site is organized by the four things a gift buyer actually knows - how many people, what the occasion is, who it is for, what they can spend - rather than by genre. It is why no term appears without a definition in the same sentence. And it is why we rank partly on how quickly a game can be explained, which no enthusiast site would ever do.

Who writes it

Scooter M., an enthusiast. Scooter M. is an enthusiast who's genuinely into this. I read the rulebooks, compile the figures the publisher puts on the box, and check what a game actually costs today rather than what it cost when someone last wrote about it. I have not play-tested the games on this site and I say so on every page. No lab coat, no shelf of review copies, no invented star ratings.

There is one writer here. No staff, no editorial board, no expert panel, no credentials, and no shelf of review copies. That is worth saying plainly because the ranking field in this category leads with exactly those things, and inventing them would be both dishonest and trivially easy to catch.

Who publishes it

Meeple & Mat is published by Slate Mill Group. We are a national publisher with no premises and no service area, so there is no address or phone number to list - email is how you reach us, at info@meepleandmat.com.

What is on the site

48 pages covering 40 games, organized into six sections:

• By Group Size - How many people are actually playing?
• By Occasion - What is the occasion?
• By Recipient - Who are you buying for?
• By Budget - What are you spending?
• Gift Guides - I don't know where to start
• Game Library - Tell me about one specific game

The complete list is at every page on this site.

How we make money

Affiliate commission. When you buy through a link here we earn a percentage at no extra cost to you, and a disclosure appears above the first buy link on every commercial page rather than only in the footer. It does not change which games we recommend or the order they appear in - the highest-scoring gift on this site is one of the cheapest games on it. Full statement at affiliate disclosure.

Where the name comes from

A meeple is the small wooden figure roughly shaped like a person that you move around a board - the word comes from Carcassonne and is now used for any wooden player piece. The mat is the table it all happens on. That is the whole joke, and it is the only one on the site.