If you are close to board game culture, you will probably know meeples — there is a stylized small tree custom meeples cottage industry popularized by Carcassonne and worker placement games. There is a Meeple-themed board game cafe. There are dozens of board games with "meeple" in the title. Meeples are for people.

At least, that was an assumption until just last month. As BoardGameWire, the publisher of board games, reported, Cogito Ergo Meeple—see, it's everywhere — announced that it was rebranding both the company and the recently crowdfunded game Meeple Inc after receiving a cease-and-desist email from Hans im Glück, the publisher of Carcassonne. Cogito Ergo Meeple is currently a registered trademark of Tabletop Inc.It is the publisher of Cotswold Games.

Despite the universality of the Meples, Hans im Glück, after nearly 10 years of attempts, was found to have succeeded in locking down the EU trademark of the term in 2019 and the now standardized Meples piece shape created for Carcassonne in 2000. It turned out. Moritz Brunnhofer, CEO of Hans im Glück, told BoardGameWire that the publisher had enforced the trademark in "some" previous cases, but Meeple Inc clearly feels like a prominent choice in the sea of illegal meepleware.By the end of Tabletop Inc's crowdfunding campaign at Gamefound, Cotswold Games had raised more than2200,000.

The popular meeple silhouette originated in Carcassonne in 2000, but the term "meeple" itself was not.Don't eat Meeples, as recorded on the blog — again, everywhere — the term can be traced back to something you can trust through Usenet posts from shortly after Carcassonne's release. According to a post from 2000-12-3, the credit for "meeple" belongs to Alison Hansel, who accidentally fused the word "my people" when Carcassonne referred to the work that she officially called "followers.""

The future of meeples is suddenly uncertain, but Brunnhofer seems to be fully aware of the anger of potential board gamers caused by the cease-fire and cease-fire letters. "If someone asks us well," Brunnhofer told BoardGameWire, "we will allow the use of [meeples] and continue based on the intention of whether to commercialize it."Brunnhofer also said decided to apologize to the Cotswold Games.