Welcome to A Black Meeple
A meeple with an afro. It’s poorly drawn. Sorry y’all. I’m not an artist, but shout out to ami0amii for teaching me how to draw a fro!
Hiya!
I hope all is well!
Welcome to my blog! I hope you’ve had a chance to read my about me page, but if not, my name is Andrea Smith. I am currently a fourth-year PhD student at the University of Iowa. As this blog evolves, I hope you’ll gain a better idea of who I am, but it’s critical that you know that I am a Black nerd.
This blog is meant to talk about the intersection of board games, nerd culture, play, race, and sociology. Again, I’m a nerd, and sometimes my interests intersect, and I want to write about all of it. However, 1) publishing academic articles takes forever, and 2) I don’t think ASR would publish an article about how trick-taking games can attract more Black people to the hobby. That’s not necessarily on their highest priority list, so this is where I will share all of that. Not all of my thoughts are shunned by the academy, though! You can find my current publications on my linktree or on my Researchgate.
Now that I’ve addressed the purpose of this blog, maybe I should explain what a meeple is, let alone a Black Meeple. Are you familiar with pawns? Like the ones in Sorry? Meeples are sort of like that. They are small, typically wooden, pawns that are somewhat blob or starfish-shaped. In board games, they normally represent workers or people. For instance, in Rise of Tribes, they are your tribe members, but in Cupcake Empire, they are your customers.
Picture of some of the mepeles included in Cupcake Empire. Image is taken from the PDF of the rulebook. Fun fact: Cupcake Empire has Black meeples! :D
The term meeple can be traced down to one game group. David Bernzzani, one of the players from the group, posted a Session Report for November 25, 2000 that included a reflection on one of their games of Carcassonne:
Carcassonne - I got my 2nd and 3rd plays of this light tile laying game tonight. I like it! Of course I'm a sucker for good tile laying games - usually they have just the right blend of luck and skill (and are usually fast). This one did not disappoint. There are 72 tiles - each turn you pick one up, lay it on the board (so that it makes sense - roads to roads, cities to cities, etc) and potentially place a little wee-wooden person (which we called 'Meeples' which I think stood for 'My People' but you'd have to ask Alison who coined it) on the tile just played. In this way, you try to score for completed roads, cities, cloisters and later in the game for farms (depending on where you put your Meeple, you created either a thief, knight, farmer, or monk to correspond with the terrain features of the tiles). It plays a little long for a simple tile-laying game - all three games were just over an hour. But the turns come around fairly fast and so long as players don't agonize over the "best" placement it should play in just under an hour. I look forward to playing it with 2 players (all my games have been 4 player games) to see how it scales down.
The Alison mentioned is Alison Hansel. The figures were originally called followers, which the players didn’t particularly like, so they started referring to them “my dudes” or “my people.” Alison slipped up one time and called them meeple, which was funny, but also it kind of worked. She claimed to be the type of person who keeps saying a joke over and over again. This joke quickly became unironic, slipped up and became one of the most iconic symbols in modern board gaming; pretty quickly I might add.
According to Matt Montgomery, about a month after its coining, someone named Andrew W. made a post about Carcassonne strategies, referring to the followers as meeples instead, citing Alison as the originator of the term. The Spielfrieks mailing list started The Meeples Choice Award in 2001.
Meeples are everywhere in board games now and they come in many different materials (like plastic/acrylic), shapes (like animals), sizes, and colors. They could be plain or custom painted. They can even have accessories in Tiny Epic Quest. They are so diverse!
Ryan and I’s wedding cake with blue and red meeples as toppers.
Originally, meeples were a stand-in for my people, but in a way, I feel like hobby board gamers are meeples because the symbol is so closely associated with not only us as a group. The meeple is heavily connected to my life. I have a meeple tattoo. Ryan and I decided to ask our friend to 3D print meeples to put on our wedding cake, red for me and blue for him, since we always pick those colors when we game together.
I’m a meeple, but I’m also socialized a Black person, so I thought it would be cool to name my site and blog A Black Meeple because that’s who I am. A Black person who loves board games and other nerdy leisure activities, which I will also talk about here as well!
Hopefully, you all enjoy my nerdy ramblings and reflections. :D
Andrea Smith (She/They)
PhD Candidate
Graduate Teaching Assistant
Department of Sociology and Criminology
University of Iowa
