Meepile - A BoardGameGeek Driven Hit

Game designer Bobby Doran has a minor hit on his hands with the release of Meepile, a dexterity game of sorts. “I was watching my daughters pile up their meeples while playing a game and decided I needed to make a game out of it,” he says. “After sketching some over-sized meeples in different positions, I decided to go with a one hand up meeple, which has sort of a waitress-serving-up-lunch feel to it. After cutting out and painting a dozen ‘Meepiles,’ I wrote up some super simple rules and we played a few games.”

The goal in Meepile is to stack your supply of seven meeples onto the giant’s outstretched hand. You take turns, keeping any that fall during your placement, and the round ends when someone places his final meeple on the stack. Players are penalized for their remaining meeples, and the game lasts a number of rounds equal to the number of players.

After posting photos, Doran has seen a surprising amount of interest in something that he created on a lark. “I’ve received more than thirty requests for the game and the orders keep coming in,” he said. “I had to spend the weekend making fifty more. I have had requests from all over the U.S., Australia, Canada, England and Germany. I think it really shows how iconic the meeple is and it also shows how important it is to have an interesting image for people to see what the game is about. But most of all it shows what an incredible site BGG is.”

If you want to add to Doran’s workload, contact him through BGG.

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Eric, whether or not this effect is properly called “the long tail” (a debate I’m certainly not qualified to resolve), it certainly illustrates quite eloquently the point you made in your February 16 article about BGG effectively aggregating a diffuse niche market. Behold the mystery of twenty-first century distribution in action! Posted by David Lund on Mar 10, 2008 at 09:03 AM | #

I agree, David, and thanks for pointing it out. The only “problem” with the business model is that Bobby Doran should be charging a lot more than $4 (plus shipping) for giant, hand-carved, hand-painted meeples! Eric Posted by W. Eric Martin on Mar 10, 2008 at 09:06 AM | #

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