Hi, I’m Deanna, or D, wife to the Bellhop and mom to two gamer girls in training. I also run Maple Leaf Mommy, a successful Canadian parenting/lifestyle blog which is currently on hiatus. 

All those games that the Bellhop reviews or mentions in his weekly round ups? I’m at the table and playing about 90% of the time.

One of my main jobs here at this virtual gaming hotel is to moderate the live chat during our Wednesday night Twitch streams. I’m also the editor for this site (so, yes, every one of Moe’s typos or spelling errors that has slipped out into the wild — that’s on me) and the one in charge of blog maintenance and SEO. 

Maintaining our list of “Over 200 Tabletop Games to Play For Free During Quarantine” and our list of Etsy creators selling handmade and unique tabletop gaming goodies are two of my favourite pet projects.

I can also be found hard at work tracking down deals for our various tabletop game deals pages and tweeting away on our @Tabletop_Deals account, where Moe and I tag off taking turns sharing the best board game and RPG deals from around the net. 

If you want to know a bit more about me as a gamer:

For RPGs, I started with Red Box D&D back in the 80s (and I still have a soft spot for OSR style). The last long-term campaign I played in was Warhammer Fantasy 3rd ed. More recently I’ve played World Wide Wrestling, Numenera and Savage Worlds one shots. Our weekly home game has sadly devolved into a board gaming meet up night (and thanks to the Pandemic, even that is currently on pause).

For board games, three games stand out from my 80s childhood: Rat Race, Electronic Detective, and Dark Tower. Settlers of Catan was my gateway to modern hobby board gaming. Stefan Feld is my fav game designer. Trajan is one of my favourite board games. Other favourites include Hacienda, Terraforming Mars, and Steam. 

History of the And She Games handle:

In 2013, I started a blog called And She Games. It was a joint project I launched with a very non-gamer geek friend, Shari from the Knit Wit by Shair. The original idea was to profile female bloggers who also happened to be gamers (of all stripes from board to video game). The hotseat/spotlight idea never took off.  Instead for a few years, we posted random game memes, musings and reviews. However, we quickly discovered that running multiple blogs wasn’t feasible, timewise. Shari and I agreed that we were better off focusing our energies on our main blogs and in 2017 we shuttered And She Games.

In the summer of 2018, I helped my husband launch his new gaming blog and podcast here at Tabletop Bellhop. As well as helping with behind the scenes editing and blog set up type stuff, I took on the job of moderating the weekly live Twitch chats. For which I needed a handle. Since I already “owned” And She Games dusting off and reusing the Facebook and Twitter accounts seemed like a good idea.

If you happen to know me from the old ASG blog — Welcome back!

And to everyone else — See you in the chat stream!