'Geist' is All About Family for N. Va Game Designer

By Darien Bates

There are some who consider board games a relic from a quickly disappearing past, a time before TV and video games absorbed the focus of much of the pre-teen and teenage collective attention span.

But Rose Anderson is not one of those people.

This Sunday, Anderson Vienna, Virginia resident and creator of “Geist,” one of the popular new independently-designed board games on the market, is expected to attend the second annual Holiday Game Festival at the University of Maryland Stamp Student Union Grand Ballroom in College Park, hosted by North Star Games, a Maryland-based board game company.

For Anderson it will be another stop in a world tour that has encompassed much of her life since the game was released last year.

While board games remain very popular around the world, including most notably Germany, where the games often replace movies as a major form of family entertainment, in America the games have lost ground to the more popular video games. This year, as the holiday season rolls around, all the attention is on the new Xbox and Play Station PSP, the hot new technologies of the moment. Video games have become so popular they are beginning to challenge Hollywood for total entertainment spending.

Meanwhile, the classic “Monopoly”-style board game has started gathering dust in America’s closets. Anderson said that her own children thought that board games were outdated and boring.

But for Anderson, a lifetime board game fan, the video game craze is not just a challenge to her beloved games but also to the time spent with her family.

More and more, her children were going off on their own to play video games, eschewing the group togetherness that is a part of board game culture.

Anderson decided to fight back against this. But rather than just create family rules against video games, she decided to take the games head-on, creating a new board game using some of the aspects of video games.

What she came up with was “Geist,” a strategy game about capturing ghosts.

She noted that video games use elaborate rules, dramatic storylines and fascinating characters to get people interested. She wanted to see if she could capture some of that same dynamic in “Geist.”

Instead of trying to limit the rules, she decided to expand the possibilities, allowing players to discover new ways of making the game work. She designed a storyline around the game that included dramatic characters with mysterious backgrounds. She made it possible for players to figure out their own ways of working together or against each other, including playing pranks. She even allowed players to cheat, requiring each player to keep watch on the game at all times.

But all those aspects were secondary to the most important part of any board game; the player’s role in determining how to make movement decisions.

Though Anderson had been making board games since she graduated from college, she had always been frustrated with the movement systems. She didn’t like the chance of rolling the dice, which took the strategy out of many games.

In “Geist,” rather than use dice to determine how many spaces a person could move their token, she developed a system based on Pascal’s triangle, where numbers are laid out in a checkerboard pattern, each number being the sum of the two numbers above it. Players move their tokens based on the number they land on.

Anderson stumbled on the system during her lunch break when she was working as a data architect. A mathematician, Anderson was instantly compelled by the idea that a mathematical concept could serve as the basis for movement that would be both flexible and logical.

Though the movement system is based on math, Anderson said it hasn’t gotten in the way of children enjoying the game. In fact, she said that kids often have an easier time early on because they don’t even think about the math that’s involved they just do it, while adults tend to get hung up with the numbers.

She recently received a U.S. patent for her invention, something seldom done for new board games.

As soon as she figured out the movement, Anderson couldn’t stop working on the game. She said she carried the rules around with her everywhere she went, closing loopholes while adding more and more options for the players.

She created personalities for the ghosts, and even histories. And she made a way for players to pull pranks on each other using the ghosts they capture.

After she had a rough version, then came the test runs. Her husband and children played game after game, discovering the flaws and making suggestions for improvements. Each time she would return to the drawing board and make corrections.

Even after all the work developing it, she wasn’t sure about actually marketing the game. Then one afternoon her son was playing video games with a friend and invited him to play “Geist.” At first he was dubious, Anderson said. He didn’t think a board game could possibly match a video game. Still, he eventually agreed to play. The next day he was back at the house asking if he could play it again.

With that encouragement, Anderson shopped the game around and in 2004 the game was released to glowing reviews.

Critics have praised everything from the artistic design to the movement system, which many said seemed complicated at first but quickly becomes second nature.

But the biggest satisfaction to Anderson is the fact that she continues to play the game with her family. Despite her children now being teenagers, there are still nights when they break out the “Geist” board and share an evening of competition. And for a brief while, at least, it’s the video games that are gathering dust.