Although one might think the haunted theme would play into an old stereotype that paints game shops as dark dungeons, this Fort Collins game shop has large picture windows and an eclectic clientele. Couples who are looking for something different from the same old movie night find that here they can play and converse during a date. Families can get away from the television and tensions of home while relaxing over a game. Groups of friends or acquaintances can laugh and play and trounce each other in friendly competition. Whether people want a game that is easy to learn and play in an evening, or something more complex, whether they want a board game, a card game, or something else, they will find something interesting on the wall of open games.

Check out the whole article here.

Werewolf is a game of deception and manipulation. It has infected almost every significant tech event around the world, from the informal Foo Camp conferences run by O’Reilly to the music, film and interactive-media crossover of South By Southwest (SXSW). During lunch at San Francisco’s giant Game Developers Conference, or in the bars after closing at ETech, games of Werewolf break out spontaneously. Its core premise is simple — a room is split between villagers and werewolves, and the former aren’t aware who are their enemies, determined to eat them. Can the werewolves eat their prey before the villagers identify and lynch the werewolves?

In practice — perhaps unsurprisingly, given the kind of people playing — the games played at tech events are rarely that simple. Groups splinter off according to arcane variations — someone wants to play with the Slut and the Invalid, someone else with the Vigilante and the Veterinarian, someone else with all four. Rules agreed, the splinter groups reform, spectators gather, and the games begin. And it may be hours before they stop. Although in principle a round of Werewolf can take as little as 30 minutes, epic rounds last for hours – and one round is rarely enough. The next morning, appropriately, you can spot the werewolves by the red rings round their eyes.

Wales, Fitzpatrick, Gibson and their moderator were the last players standing after an all-night Werewolf session that had lured in almost a third of 2008′s Foo Camp. Three players remaining meant only one thing: two villagers, one werewolf. It meant the players who knew they were villagers faced a simple challenge: which of the others was the enemy? And yet the argument had raged for hours. “I was sure of only three things,” Wales remembers. “One, I was not a werewolf. Two, one of these bastards was an amazing liar. And three, the other guy was a total moron. I just couldn’t figure out which was which.”

Read the full article here: Werewolf:  How a parlour game became a tech phenomenon.

Warning, one of the quotes in the story is NSFW.

The overall toy industry’s sales are down 2 percent for 2009, but they’re up 4 percent for board games, according to market research firm NPD Group Inc.

Among the gaming cognoscenti, much of the credit for the boom goes to one game: The Settlers of Catan.

“That changed everything,” said Sheila, sitting beside the pingpong table with her husband and Lenny Scovell, 46, another board-game enthusiast. They all made “ooh” sounds and shook their heads in agreement. “That was the breakthrough game.”

In addition to its coffee, of which espresso is the store’s signature drink, The Haunted Café offers games ranging from “Arkham Horror” to “A Touch of Evil.” There is also a wall of open games where customers can come in and play a game while drinking coffee.

Read the full article here.

Members of the staff will be available for autographs by appointment only.

UPDATE: A longer article with pictures has been posted. You can find it here.

Most interesting to me, are the sections describing the growing popularity of board games. Sales of Settlers of Catan last year were double that of 2007 in the US and Canada. In all, the game as sold over 15 million copies worldwide.

Settlers has become so successful in the US that other German-style games are starting to ride in its wake, even in the midst of the recession. New Mexico entrepreneur Jay Tummelson licenses, translates, and imports German mass-market hits like Carcassonne alongside more offbeat titles like Galaxy Trucker by Czech designer Vlaada Chvatil. His company, Rio Grande Games, sold half a million of these titles in 2008. “We’re growing at 30 to 35 percent a year, compounded,” he says. “In the US, most of my customers this year weren’t my customers two or three years ago. They didn’t know these games existed.”

The article also does a nice job of describing what it is that makes these new style boardgames so intreging.

Settlers is now poised to become the biggest hit in the US since Risk. Along the way, it’s teaching Americans that board games don’t have to be either predictable fluff aimed at kids or competitive, hyperintellectual pastimes for eggheads. Through the complex, artful dance of algorithms and probabilities lurking at its core, Settlers manages to be effortlessly fun, intuitively enjoyable, and still intellectually rewarding, a potent combination that’s changing the American idea of what a board game can be.

Thanks to the BoardgameNews twitter feed for the link.