Upping their game: Peninsula company Boosted Reality aims to bring together tabletop gaming and high tech - The Almanac

What happens when two friends share a passion for board games, experience in tech and an entrepreneurial spirit? In the case of Peninsula residents Steve Holmes and Jeremy Bennett, the result of those mutual interests is Boosted Reality, a gaming platform that combines table-top games with technology available on most smartphones to provide an enhanced experience. Their company priorities? Accessibility, inclusivity and, of course, lots of fun.

Holmes and Bennett met more than 20 years ago, when their children were in the same cooperative day care in Belmont. Over the years, Holmes, a mechanical engineer based in Redwood City, and Bennett, a San Carlos software engineer, have worked together a number of times, for companies including Hewlett Packard and Intel, and they and their families have developed an enduring friendship. One of their favorite things to do together is play board games. Eventually their mutual passion for games and technology inspired them to develop their own.

“It was kind of a natural decision to try and build a game together, and something that not only is fun to play but incorporates technology in a really unique and inclusive way,” Holmes said. “That was where Boosted Reality started: To take what we learned in our years working in the tech industry and apply it to a genre we really cared about and really enjoyed, which is gaming.”

The traditional table-top and role-playing games they love often involve elaborate set-ups, thick rulebooks and an awful lot of time. This can be daunting to new players (or even veteran ones).

“We wanted to create a game that had a lot of richness to it but was super easy to learn, so that anybody could pick it up and start to enjoy it, and grow in your understanding and your engagement over time,” Holmes said. “We have a number of friends and family members who have learning differences or cognitive differences so we wanted to build a game that was very much inclusive to them as well.”

Their first game, Rift Zone: Contact, offers an intergalactic setting and a storyline involving two advanced civilizations– the United Earth Defense Force and the insect-like Scry’Ox Collective – as they battle to control the habitable world of Proxima Centauri B.

Their skirmish creates rifts in space, cutting off both civilizations from their home planets and leaving them in an alien world, lush with fungal-esque habitats and the ruins of an ancient civilization that is seemingly extinct.

“I am a lover of classic sci-fi and so is Jeremy. We really wanted it to be sort of an epic, space opera sort of tale, something that would be expansive,” Holmes said.

The game is played on a board, with miniature figurines, and also uses a smartphone app. The characters come with backstories, weaponry and skills, and the app helps make players instantly aware of their capabilities without needing to spend a ton of time researching or calculating. Instead, they can learn as they play.

“The player can say, ‘I want to do this’ and the app can say ‘OK, here’s what happens’ and, even better, because we’ve got augmented reality, I can let people who maybe are not so spatially aware, visualize,” Bennett said. Each miniature comes with a unique embedded RFID (radio frequency identification) chip, which the app uses to track each piece and enable individual experiences and upgrades for each character. And by looking at the board, with its terrain tiles, through the app, players can also use augmented reality to see the planet’s landscape three dimensionally. The app can provide sound effects and music as well. The goal is to create a multisensory experience for players as well as making it more accessible and simpler to join.

”A lot of people are interested in playing more involved games but they don’t want to spend three hours learning the rules. At least we don’t,” Holmes said.

Bennett himself has a visual impairment and said in traditional game set-ups he sometimes has trouble seeing well enough when needing to make decisions based on the environment.

“One of the things that I really struggle with in complex, fun board games is a situation where I’ve got a little board in front of me with all my pieces and things that I’m doing, you’ve got a board in front of you … I need to make a decision based on what you’re going to do and what Steve’s going to do … I just can’t see that far,” he said. “What we were able to do with the Boosted Reality platform is move a lot of that to the smartphone.” Using the phone app, a player is able to adjust the format and see things in larger print, or high contrast, for example. “It kind of equalizes a lot of things,” he said.

They’ve tested the game with players as young as 5 and those into their 70s to ensure its suitability for a range of ages, abilities and attention spans.

“It’s actually been really fun because we’re thinking about this game on multiple levels,” Holmes said, figuring out how to accommodate players who want to play a quick game over dinner as well as those who want to be part of an ongoing campaign.

“We want to also have a game where it will evolve, so you can play it cooperatively – if you and I wanted to play against the AI we could do that – or you could play it as a solo game,” he said.

Both Holmes and Bennett grew up loving games with storytelling, worldbuilding and strategy.

“I was always that kid who was making up games,” Bennett recalled. As he grew up, he began to play video games as well as board games, and sees Boosted Reality as a bridge between both types. Though the tech element is important, maintaining the tangible, communal aspect of classic board games is just as key.

“As much as we love technology, we wanted to facilitate the in-person experience not replace the in-person experience,” Holmes said. “We don’t want to lose that personal connection for people.”

They’re also mindful of the fact that not everyone has – or wants to use – a smartphone, so “Rift Zone: Contact” is also playable in a completely analog format, too.

“One of the things that we have been thinking about along the way is the idea that the apocalypse happens, mobile phones are now only used as paperweights, we still want people to be able to enjoy the game,” Holmes said. “We have a paper and dice version of the game that’s simple and fast and fun to play but obviously doesn’t have all the richness of the full game.”

The ideas behind Boosted Reality have been percolating for a while, with Holmes and his son first working on the game years ago.

“Steve came to me and showed me the initial patent that he’d written and I said. ‘Well, that’s great. I love this idea,’ because much like Steve I hate sitting for half an hour for a lecture on how to play the game, ‘but I don’t think it’s going to be successful until nearly everybody has a phone in their pockets that can do all these things,'” Bennett recalled. As smartphone capabilities have increased over the past few years, he said, “now is the time to launch it.”

Holmes and Bennett plan to start selling and shipping the game sometime in the first half of this year, directly to consumers initially, then working with local game stores and distributors.

“We want to make sure we only scale as fast as we can build,” Bennett said.

And while Rift Zone: Contact is the first Boosted Reality product, its founders said it’s just the beginning.

“We have two paths – making sure that technology can be used not only to adapt existing games, if somebody wanted to do that, but also opening it up so that anybody can make their own game,” offering a platform for new board games the way Roblox does for video games, Bennett said.

“What we’re building is not just one game,” Holmes said. “It’s a platform that other people can build games with and we can use for all kinds of other experiences.”

More information is available at boostedreality.myshopify.com/. Instagram: @boostedrealityllc.

Karla is an assistant lifestyle editor with Embarcadero Media, working on arts and features coverage. More by Karla Kane