Wednesday, July 23, 2008
Is B&N your FLGS?
Is Barnes and Noble your Friendly Local Game Store?
It just might be.
Stopped by Barnes and Noble the other evening and I was rather surprised at their game selection. In recent years B&N has beefed up their game selection around Christmas to include some of TGOO (boardgame snob term for These Games Of Ours), but cut back on games after Christmas to free up space for books.
There were several areas scattered about the store where boardgames were featured. I thought to myself, they have a decent selection of boardgames, I should make a list for the old blog.
Let me lead with my observation that they did have plenty of the box store crap such as: 15 different versions of Monopoly, Scene It, Risk, Cranium, numerous trivia games, Munchkin, and assorted other crap that will sell well to an uniformed public but is ultimately destined for the bottom of the closet and thrift store shelves. If you look between the piles of crap you will find: Acquire, Modern Art, Blokus, Age of Empires III, Carcassonne, Settlers of Catan with various expansions, Ingenious, Diplomacy, the revised Axis and Allies, Knizia's Great wall of China, and a few others. Not a bad selection at all.
There were other games that were not box store fare, nor TGOO, such as Dread Pirate and a few others that are not commonly known. One must do some research to discover that they are utter crap... or not. They even had a B&N exclusive game, "The Origin of Expressions, the game that keeps you guessing" which looks like a Balderdash clone.
An exclusive game. I think that is a good sign. Another good sign is that they have so many different titles so far from the Christmas season. Here's hoping this trend continues.
It just might be.
Stopped by Barnes and Noble the other evening and I was rather surprised at their game selection. In recent years B&N has beefed up their game selection around Christmas to include some of TGOO (boardgame snob term for These Games Of Ours), but cut back on games after Christmas to free up space for books.
There were several areas scattered about the store where boardgames were featured. I thought to myself, they have a decent selection of boardgames, I should make a list for the old blog.
Let me lead with my observation that they did have plenty of the box store crap such as: 15 different versions of Monopoly, Scene It, Risk, Cranium, numerous trivia games, Munchkin, and assorted other crap that will sell well to an uniformed public but is ultimately destined for the bottom of the closet and thrift store shelves. If you look between the piles of crap you will find: Acquire, Modern Art, Blokus, Age of Empires III, Carcassonne, Settlers of Catan with various expansions, Ingenious, Diplomacy, the revised Axis and Allies, Knizia's Great wall of China, and a few others. Not a bad selection at all.
There were other games that were not box store fare, nor TGOO, such as Dread Pirate and a few others that are not commonly known. One must do some research to discover that they are utter crap... or not. They even had a B&N exclusive game, "The Origin of Expressions, the game that keeps you guessing" which looks like a Balderdash clone.
An exclusive game. I think that is a good sign. Another good sign is that they have so many different titles so far from the Christmas season. Here's hoping this trend continues.
# posted by Coldfoot @ 1:01 AM 
