Why So Cutesy, Mr Meeple?

Hello there, people of the interweb! If you made it over here you might ask yourself one big question; “Why in the name of good taste and decency is this blog called Meeple Heart Meeple?”. Well, let me explain it to you.

If you’ve managed to find us you probably already understand what a meeple is so I’ll just skip the redundancy and not explain that part. We were deliberating what to call this blog – going through all sorts of more and less bad names – when my eyes struck upon our wedding cake topper that sits in our living room vitrine; a yellow and a blue meeple standing side by side holding up a heart. Obviously reading the symbology from left to right it was reading out “Meeple Heart Meeple”. Since we’ve been playing board games together almost since the day we met, and board games have been our mutual passion for all these years we’ve spent together, it felt somewhat natural. So that’s why we went with this silly but very symbolical title.

This is a joint blog where we can express ourselves and write about our beloved hobby. We have no plan, no structure. We have no grand scheme, no point of direction. Just to write and discus about board games of all kind. I am not going to introduce or speak for my beloved wife Linda (or Rinuda as she is commonly known in cyberspace) – she is more than capable of doing that herself, much better than I ever could, so let me introduce myself.

Hello there again, people of the interweb! My name is Jens. Throughout the dark corners and shabby plains of cyberspace I am more commonly known as BrainOfJ83 or Plush (exclusively on BoardGameGeek). Please do not ask me about the origin of either of those names because I can’t give you a believable answer. I’ve been playing board games and card games all my life. Throughout my childhood we played a lot of the classic family games that most families had, but we also played a ton of different standard deck card games. This was amplified during my teens when my stepdad started teaching me trick-taking card games, and we played a hell of a lot of those continuously. But in the early years of the new millennium things exploded. My brother found Carcassonne and introduced it to me. And that was the Big Bang for me. The underlying love I had for board games / card games / tabletop games (whatever you want to call it) took of with lightning speed and shook my world. It didn’t take long for my shelf at home to start filling with different kinds of board games of this new type; back then they were called “designer games”.

Some years later, in the winter of 2006, I met Linda on a social forum on the internet. On January 7^th of 2007 I drove through a blizzard to meet her for the first time in real life and fell madly in love. A few days later I dragged here down with me into the wonderful world of board games. Of course she had played a lot as a child, but she hadn’t been introduced to these magical designer games, and soon board gaming was our way of dating. At the time of writing we have a collection of over 800 items (expansions included) even though we’re going to the process of culling it down and selling or trading away the games that we don’t get to the table.

If you’re asking yourself if there is a life beyond the board games, then I’d have to answer that with a “unfortunately yes”. Of course my answer would be sarcastic, since most things beyond the board games in my life is just as, or even more inspiring. In the summer of 2016 our son was born and he is the light of our day, already growing up to become as much as a gamer as his parents. I work as a hotel manager for a chain of hotels, which is something I had never imagined myself doing, but have become very passionate about.

I love to be creative whether it’s in the kitchen cooking, or in a workshop woodworking, and I love to tinker around with different kinds of technology. I’m also an avid computer gamer even though that has taken a back seat to the family life, work and board games. I’m the kind of person who’s really intrigued by almost everything – I love to learn and I love to apply knowledge to everything else.

What would my board gaming profile look like then? I love diversity and like to try new types of games, but I’m generally drawn to middle weight eurogames that are playable with two players. My biggest weakness would be three dimensional games because those immediately capture my attention. I find that games in the 30-60 minute playtime-range are optimal, and if there’s a puzzle-element then you’ve struck gold. But as said; I love all sorts of games.

So that’s me. We’ll try to update the blog as often as we can (within reason) but we really have no plan for it. Please comment, ask, judge, let us know your opinion. We really want to interact.