How Boosted Reality is Changing the Game
The Future of Tabletop Gaming
For decades, board games have brought people together, blending strategy, storytelling, and competition into unforgettable experiences. But let’s be honest, long rulebooks, tedious setup, and complicated mechanics can kill the excitement before the first move is made. Boosted Reality was born from the idea that gaming should be easier to learn, faster to play, and as immersive as possible.
This is the story of how two lifelong gamers, Steven Holmes and Jeremy Bennett, took their passion for board games, strategy, and sci-fi and turned it into something new. Their first game, Rift Zone: Contact, is a taste of a much bigger vision, one that blends augmented reality, smart tech, and board gaming in a way that hasn’t been done before.
From Plastic Toy Tanks to Augmented Reality Battles
It all started in a hobby shop in Mountain View, California. Steven was a kid when he found a box of tiny WWII tank models. There wasn’t an official game to play with them, so he made one up. Armed with a book on WWII weapons, dice, a tape measure, and whatever household objects could stand in for terrain, he and his friends built their own battle system.
That experience stuck with him. Not just because it was fun, but because it was the first time he realized that games were something you could create.
From that moment on, games became a lifelong obsession. RPGs, deep strategy board games, miniature games, even real-time strategy video games. Anything that let him build, plan, and outmaneuver an opponent. But there was always one problem.
The more complex a game was, the harder it was to actually play. Throw in a mix of friends on different schedules and it’s even harder. You spend weeks coordinating, finally get everyone together, then waste hours realizing you’ve been playing it wrong the whole time because of that one rule you misunderstood.
Learning the rules took forever. Some games required spreadsheets just to track stats. The games were amazing, but getting them to the table was the hard part.
The Spark of an Idea
Fast-forward to 2017. Steven was deep in the tech world when a conversation with his longtime friend Jeremy got him thinking. What if smartphones, the tech everyone already carried in their pockets, could take care of all the annoying parts of tabletop gaming?
Jeremy, a software engineer who had worked with WebOS at HP/Palm and AR glasses at Intel, immediately saw the potential. Steve wanted a way to streamline gameplay. Jeremy had another perspective.
For him, the idea was personal. He has a visual impairment, which makes playing some traditional tabletop games a challenge. A phone could do more than just track stats and replace measuring tapes. It could highlight information, show exactly where units could move, and make it easier to see what was happening on the board.
That was the moment it clicked. What if a game could keep all the strategy and depth of a great tabletop experience while cutting out the friction?
A New Way to Play
To test their idea, they needed a game. Not an app for an existing game, but something designed from the ground up to merge the physical and digital worlds. That game became Rift Zone: Contact.
No rulebooks. The app walks you through the game. No flipping through pages, no confusion about mechanics, just straight into the action.
No measuring tapes (though Steven might secretly miss them). Augmented reality handles all the movement, line of sight, and range calculations instantly.
Your miniatures remember their history. Each unit has an RFID tag, tracking its battles and progression, unlocking new abilities over time.
Faster play, deeper strategy. The app takes care of the technical stuff so players can focus on making smart tactical decisions.
Rift Zone: Contact takes place on Proxima Centauri B, where two factions, the United Earth Defense Force and the insectoid Scry’Ox Collective, fight for survival. But there’s something bigger happening in the background. Space-time itself is unraveling, and both species are caught in the middle of a war neither of them fully understands.
The game is just the beginning.
Beyond One Game, A Bigger Vision
For Steven and Jeremy, Boosted Reality is a path toward rethinking how tabletop gaming works.
Right now, complex games come with a barrier to entry. You either spend hours learning and setting up, or you just don’t play at all. That doesn’t have to be the case.
What if anyone could design their own game, no rulebook required?
What if a player’s army could carry its own history from game to game, tracking victories, defeats, and even scars from battle?
What if learning a new strategy game was as easy as picking up a controller for the first time?
The goal isn’t to replace physical games with digital ones. It’s about using technology to remove the frustrating parts while keeping everything that makes tabletop gaming special.
Augmented reality bridges the gap, enhancing what’s already on the table rather than replacing it. AR overlays movement, range, and combat details in real time, so you can focus on tactics instead of rulebook clarifications.
The feel of rolling dice, moving pieces, and watching a battle unfold right in front of you is what matters. The tech should disappear into the background, making the experience smoother and more immersive, not more complicated.
What’s Next?
After years of development and a successful GenCon demo, Boosted Reality is gearing up to launch Rift Zone: Contact in 2025.
For the board game community, it’s a look at where the future of gaming could go. For video game fans, it’s a way to experience a bit of the mobile app play they love, but enhanced with tangible pieces they can move and interact with.
Whether you love fast two-player duels, intense four-player battles, or deep campaign-style games, this is something different. And if you’ve ever wanted to create your own game but didn’t know where to start, Boosted Reality is working on tools that might just make that possible.
The future of tabletop gaming is closer than you think. And this is only the beginning.
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