Meeple
Small wooden human-like board-game piece / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A meeple is a small board-game piece, usually with a stylized human form.[1][2][3] They are usually made from wood and painted in bright colors. Meeples have been called an icon of German-style board games ("Eurogames").[4] The word is a contraction of "my people".[5][6]
Meeples are more anthropomorphized than pawns. Whereas pawns have a stylized head and body, meeples have a more humanoid shape, with limbs.[3] They have replaced pawns in many modern games, making the latter a rarity outside classic games.[5]
Meeples as a player token design are believed to have been introduced by the 1984 game Top Secret Spies. Carcassonne, published by Hans im Glück in 2000,[2][7] has been credited with popularizing the modern concept and shape of the meeple.[5] They have since become a popular component of many modern board games.[2][5][8]
The modern meeple was likely designed by Bernd Brunnhofer [de], German game designer, entrepreneur, and founder of Hans im Glück. Although the figures were initially referred to as "followers", Alison Hansel, an American gamer, coined the name meeples in November 2000.[9][10] According to Alicia Nield, owner of the company MeepleCity, Hansel accidentally combined the words "my people" during a game of Carcassonne.[11] The term was popularized through the website BoardGameGeek.[5][11][12] On November 27, 2000, Hansel made a post on the Unity Games forums proposing the term meeples to describe these figures.[13] In 2019, "MEEPLE" was registered as an EU trade mark owned by Hans im Glück,[14] even though the term (and even the shape) has been used in common parlance, as well as published in other games' rulebooks since the term was coined in 2010 by a player on a forum, neither of which were affiliated with Hans im Glück. This continued without contest from Hans im Glück who, until 2022, was still calling their player tokens "followers." Several games published by large game companies, like AEG and Asmodee, have even published games with the term in the titles, as well as adopting the token design commonly associated with the term, including such games as Mutant Meeples (2012), Terror in Meeple City (2013), the Meeple Circus series (2017-2021),[15] and Meeples and Monsters and its expansion materials (2022).[16] In 2024, the company Cogito Ergo Meeple received a cease and desist for unsanctioned use of the trademark.[17]
Some companies offer hand-painted, deluxe meeples, and meeples in some games are customized in various ways; for example, Tiny Epic Quest has customizable meeples that can hold various items such as weapons.[18] Some games, including expansions to Carcassonne, have wooden figurines shaped in non-humanoid forms that are sometimes called meeples; for example, Dixit has rabbit-shaped meeples.[5] Farm animal meeples are sometimes called "sheeples", monsters "creeples", and robots "bleeples".[5] The term meeple has occasionally been used for wooden board game pieces representing inanimate objects like vehicles.[12] More elaborate miniatures used in gaming, such as the ones used in miniature wargaming, are not usually called meeples.[12]