Carcassonne
It's from 2000, before you were born.
- Maker
- Hans im Glück
- Type
- Board game (tile-laying)
- Debuted
- 2000
- Note
- Popularized the word 'meeple'
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About
As of 2026, it's 26 years old.
Carcassonne built itself up in 2000 as one of the gateway games of the modern board-gaming boom: players take turns drawing and placing tiles to construct a medieval landscape of cities, roads, and fields, claiming features with little wooden figures. Those figures gave the hobby a word it now can't live without — 'meeple.'
Easy to teach, quick to play, and endlessly expandable, it became the friendly on-ramp that converted countless people from Monopoly into the deeper world of designer games. The slow reveal of the map as tiles connect is its own quiet pleasure.
Tile-laying, meeple-claiming, and welcoming, Carcassonne is the modern classic that built a medieval map and a whole gateway into the board-game hobby.
