Barnes & Noble has started carrying a lot of good board games.

[20thlvl_rogue]

About a month ago I went into a Barnes & Noble for the first time since April. Aside from the regular, common board games like Jenga, Scrabble, etc, back in April they only had two games that were ranked high at boardgamegeek.com. These were Settlers of Catan and Carcassonne New World

Comments

[esprix]

Excellent! This time of year a lot of bookstores start stocking up on games in general, but I'll definitely poke my head into a B&N if I get the chance.

[20thlvl_rogue]

What are your favorite boardgames esprix?

[esprix]

Heh, quite a few. I'm always looking to build my library, though, so thanks for the tip. :)

[malachus]

While I don't recall seeing PR at a local B&N before, this sounds like their typical holiday season ramp up. Expect to see deep discounted copies of most of these games in early January as they sell off remaining stock and go back to normal...

[20thlvl_rogue]

I don't think it's any kind of holiday season ramp up as much as they just started carrying new titles and replacing the old ones.

Barnes & Noble has always been on the ball when it comes to board games, at least more so than their competitors.

[malachus]

You might be right, but doing a little searching, I found some comments like these:

"A gamer friend of mine told me I should pick up Carcassonne and Puerto Rico at the local Barnes and Noble during their 50% off sale in January of 2007."

"In February 2007, I found the annual Barnes & Noble game sale. Unfortunately, it was the year AFTER they carried the big-box Fantasy Flight games. But I still managed to find quite a few games at 50-75% off, and even a few for $1."

(about Make 'n' Break) "Our local Barnes and Noble has these - and with the sale starting this weekend for 50% off..." (Jan. 31, 2008)

While I admit that B&N is better than most book stores about board games, and that it is possible that they are changing for the long term, I believe the general pattern over the past several years has been a focus on holiday season marketing.

[20thlvl_rogue]

We'll see. Last year after Christmas they had no sale, at least in regards to the few good games they had then like Settlers of Catan, Carcassonne, and Munchkin.

That would be cool if they did though. I hope you're right.

[bumbletbw]

I always take a look through the games in my local store. Nothing spectacular, all of the good games have already been mentioned (Cataan, Munchkin), though I did notice a fixed deck card game from Looney Labs on the discount table.

Last year I remember them selling Acquire for 40 bucks (which is the same price as every other board game they sell), and I was waiting until it went on sale, but they disappeared before I saw a sale. If there's anything that I've learned about Barnes & Noble over the last few years, it's that their prices on everything except for the NYT Best Seller list are awful.

[lertulo]

I'm a pretty regular B&N customer (though I do my online booking through Amazon; go figure). Our local store rebuilt and expanded the game area about six months ago: the whole area went from being a floating table that moved around monthly to being a dedicated region dead center in the store, and expanded to a whopping 6 tables. Variety is very impressive for a book store, with everything from the board games mentioned above to RPGs, card games, puzzles and so on.

I agree about the prices typically being too high, but the markup isn't as bad as Toys R Us and IMHO the titles are all good choices. (I don't think I can handle seeing twelve flavors of Monopoly next to each other on the same shelf again, thank you very much.)

So, doesn't look like this is a holiday thing--looks like an intentional long-term corporate-wide directive. Can't complain about that.