Over the years, Minecraft has been proven to be one of the most popular educational tools across diverse domains and has been utilised as a participatory, creative, and simulation-based platform for engagement, learning, and co-design. This paper explores Minecraft as a co-creation tool to engage young students in exploring and understanding the cultural heritage of Hermoupolis, Syros, one of Greece’s most historically and architecturally significant neoclassical cities. We investigate how immersive digital environments like Minecraft can function not only as games or creative sandboxes, but also as collaborative heritage labs and learning spaces. In a three-month project, children, aged 8-12 collaboratively built a digital twin of Hermoupolis’ historic centre, reconstructing its iconic buildings and urban layout within Minecraft’s voxel-based limitations. Researchers guided the process by incorporating urban planning data, spatial logic, and playful building sessions, complemented by age-appropriate walking tours for grounding the digital activity in embodied, sensory experience. The project aimed to trigger curiosity, spatial reasoning, and cultivate visual literacy of scale and architectural scales and styles. We employed observational methods and questionnaires to understand how participants engaged with the city’s architecture and history through collaboration and virtual building. Our findings suggest that students developed a stronger sense of place and became more aware of buildings’ preservation, gaining the feeling of ownership over the urban and building features they digitally recreated. This study contributes to the growing field of game-based heritage education, highlighting how playful digital co-creation can foster cultural awareness and participatory citizenship among young learners.