If you're in any proximity to board game culture, you're probably aware of meeples—those stylized little wooden figure guys, popularized by Carcassonne and worker placement games that followed, to the point that they've become a kind of omnipresent cultural icon for board games as a whole. There's a custom meeple cottage industry. There are meeple-themed board game cafes. There are dozens of board games with "meeple" in the title. Meeples are for the people.
At least, that was the assumption until just last month. As reported by BoardGameWire, board game publisher Cogito Ergo Meeple—see, it's everywhere—announced in May that it was rebranding both the company and its recently-crowdfunded game Meeple Inc after receiving a cease-and-desist email from Hans im Glück, the publisher of Carcassonne. Cogito Ergo Meeple is now Cotswold Games, publisher of Tabletop Inc.
