Hello! Thank you for stopping by!

My name is Michael Heron and I'm the editor and main contributor to the site Meeple Like Us. By day I'm a university lecturer and accessibility researcher. Nights and weekends though I spend pretty much every free moment I have on the Meeple Like Us project. We review board-games and then break them down for their accessibility - we talk about the features of the games that might prevent someone being able to play.

It takes a long time to do this - it is a job on top of a job, consuming anything from 20-40 hours of my time per week. The site also has running costs that include everything from buying games to paying for a content delivery network. We look at a game a week, and our investigations are comprehensive. All of our accessibility work is available under a CC-BY 4.0 licence.

And I love it - I've been running this site since early 2016 and it has been a work of passion for me. It's not so much a research interest as it is a research obsession, and I am immensely gratified that it has gained so much attention over the time I've been running it. I get emails and messages that say how helpful the site has been for gamers with disabilities to find board-games they can play. I get more still from those that have used the site and its master list for finding games they can play with their elderly or disabled relatives. Tabletop games matter because people matter, and games are just a way we can spend more time with the people we love. I am very happy that the site can, in our small way, assist people do that.

Here's the pitch.

Part of what we do is advocacy - knocking on the doors of publishers and designers and trying to convince them they should take the topic of board game accessibility seriously. That in turn needs evidence that people take us seriously. One of the most convincing ways to provide that evidence is to show that the community is behind us, funding our analysis and advocacy. Pledging helps support this site to exist by covering its costs and a small portion of our time, but more importantly it's a signal that you believe this is work that is worth doing.

If you can spare a dollar a month (or more!) from your board-game budget to help raise the standards of accessibility in this hobby we would deeply appreciate your support.

Thank you!

If you would like to see what it is we do, here are some representative examples: