Links: Talks with Pegasus and Sit Down!, Monopoly as National Threat & More

• Carlos Abrunhosa has posted two interviews of interest on JogoEu:

-----* Christian Stenner from Pegasus Spiele covers what you can expect to see from the publisher through the end of 2011.
-----* Didier Delhez from new publisher Sit Down! talks about how Wiraqocha inspired the founding of a game company and what's coming with games #2 and #3.

• Stephen Colbert ranked Monopoly as the "#1 threat to America" in his August 3, 2011 ThreatDown due to Hasbro's announcement of Monopoly Live at Toy Fair 2011. (The Monopoly bit starts about five minutes in. HT: Alfonzo Smith)

• Franjos has released four additional puzzles (PDF) for Eric Solomon's Black Box / Black Box +.

• Agricola is now available on online gaming site Boîte à Jeux.

• French website Tric Trac has posted a video from Moonster Games and Cocktail Games that was filmed in June 2011 at the Tokyo Game Fair. If you can stomach the frenetic unsteadiness of the video, you'll get a taste of what's on the tables in Tokyo, along with hints of future projects from these publishers.

• The Lake County News-Sun reports on a man with 1,531 games who wants to take the title of Largest Collection of Board Games in the Guinness Book of World Records. Such records are typically about who wants to grab a label rather than a recording of fact...

• Ready to explore the parallels between product and documentation writing and how to write rules for board games? Then dig into "TechDoc and Board Games Parallels: Terminology Management", an article by a Czech writer featuring many examples from Czech games. (HT: Tim Moore)

• For those who want to know more about the background behind the financial backing site Kickstarter, the August 7, 2011 issue of New York Times Magazine features a long article from Rob Walker, who regularly writes about retailing and consumption for the magazine. The article doesn't mention games, but does include Walker's take on what it's like to run a project:

Quote:

I can confirm that I had no idea how much work a Kickstarter campaign would be. We had to dream up rewards that someone might actually want but that wouldn’t consume our budget, and I lost a weekend learning how to use video-editing software. But there was also this: for a month, I was shaking down every friend, and online "friend", I could think of, hoping our pitch would go viral, fighting back irrational anger at longtime pals who ignored me and feeling insane gratitude toward total strangers who chipped in $10 or $25.

(HT: Chris Kovac)

• And for a second article not focusing on games but still relevant to the game industry, check out "The Hunting of the Snark" by Francis Wheen in Financial Times, which discusses the sometimes uncomfortably close relationship between authors and those who review them. (HT: Greg Aleknevicus)