Who is Hacked Tabletop
And What is Our Future?
At the time of writing this, Hacked Tabletop is a husband-wife combo featuring me (Aaron Klaser) and Beth Klaser. We are not writers or bloggers by any means, but instead we are passionate board game enthusiasts who just want to give back to other board game and tabletop enthusiasts. Over the last 2 years of diving head first into our addiction of buying almost any game that sounded interesting, we have noticed a few gaps in the community.
We know there are 100’s, maybe 1,000’s of people out there reviewing games. We have to bring it to be able to make a name for ourselves, but we may have a few tricks up our sleeves to help set us apart from all the others.
The Problem
My biggest complaint about board game reviews has always been the quality of reviews, visually. Most reviews are well written but wither it’s the video or the photos, they are all just… crap. I’m sorry. I know how hard everyone works to put these together,I mean no insult, but it’s time to step it up.
Another common issue is the lack of quality How-To videos. Games these days are WAY more difficult then they were when I was kid. The exceptions are Watch It Played and Wil Wheaton’s Tabletop — tutorials are either not well explained or the quality is to poor for it to be beneficial.
Our Solutions
We are planning to seriously set up quality. Much to my wife’s dismay, we have invested butt-loads of money into gear; 4k Cameras, professional lighting, editing software, streaming rigs, and web cams. You will no longer see poorly lit photographs from terrible angles or some cheap web cam sat in the middle of the of room that’s really hard to see and hear.
There is going to be some trial and error to get it right, but we currently have over 160+ games in our constantly growing collection of board games to practice with.
We plan to bring you
Reviews & Previews
Unbiased reviews and previews including high quality professional photographs. We don’t think it’s the greatest game ever made just because it has mini’s. Although, I (Beth Klaser) do love some mini’s. We have designed a processes to determine our rating — which includes playing a game at least five times no matter how terrible the game may be. Learn More
How To’s & Unboxings
This is not new to the community. However, we will be using professional equipment such as lighting and a 4k camera to bring the highest quality to our tutorials, How To’s, and unboxings.
Learn it Together
Learn it Together well be a live streamed web series where we sit down and try to learn a new game together live on Twitch (and maybe a few other places).
HackedTabletop.com
Don’t worry, we have a site coming! Medium is our temporary home. We ended up choosing Medium because it is easy to set up and because reviews can be written fairly quickly. I (Aaron) am a web developer by day, and have been for the last ten years. I am building our site using React and Contentful. There may even be an easy to use app in the works.
Want Your Gamed Featured?
Featured games will get a little extra attention. They will get a photo of there game displayed front and center on our page.
We plan to have a game featured starting on March 1st, 2018. If you are interested in having your game featured on our site, drop a line to Hackedtabletop@gmail.com.
