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• Matt Morgan at MTV Geek has a long interview with Kathleen Campisano and Ellen Heaney Mizer from Barnes & Noble about how the largest retail bookseller in the U.S. started carrying board games and how that segment has grown over the years. Interesting to discover that Fantasy Flight's Civilization had a quick sellthrough. I'm still baffled that B&N stocks Agricola, given its $75 price tag – but clearly the chain thinks the buyers are there.
• Asmodee has posted a playful article titled "Making A Game: From Prototype to Project", which it promises is the first in a series showing how a game moves along precisely that path.
• Responding to complaints by attendees and attendee wannabes, Origins Game Fair has moved the dates for its 2013 show from May 29-June 2 to June 12-16, according to ICv2, with the idea being that the new dates should place the show after the end of most school years. The 2012 show, however, is still being held from May 29 to June 2, and the dates for 2014 (now June 11-15) and 2015 (June 3-7) are not locked in place.
• Purple Pawn's Sam Mercer has a long interview with Kickstarter co-founder Yancey Strickler.
• The French publication Jeux sur un Plateau has ceased publication, although the website is still up-to-date and apparently not affected the magazine going away.
• Santiago de Cuba is now on the online game site Yucata.de on a beta basis.
• A Philadelphia, Pennsylvania TV station featured Dominion, Carcassonne and The Settlers of Catan on a brief parenting segment in early January 2012. In less than two minutes, reporter David Murphy bangs out descriptions of all three games and makes them sound a lot less "hey, gosh, isn't this keen" than the news anchor who opened the segment.
• A recent episode of the U.S. television show The Big Bang Theory featured many wood-for-sheep jokes, then just wood jokes, then more wood jokes with an erection kicker. Why does any sitcom still use a laugh track? Me, I get angry listening to the push-button guffaws. (Clarification of terms used below.) (HT: Chris Kovac)
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