Shift - A Game of Life
Originally published in The Colorado Daily, January 18, 2006
A Game of Life? Shift the Game, Could Change Your Life, Local Designer Says
Living for Fun, Body and Soul Feature by Laura Snider
BOULDER - It’s not exactly Parcheesi. It’s not the same as practicing Yoga. It’s not quite a trip to the therapist, or a rowdy game of late-night poker. But somewhere in the intersection of all these seemingly unrelated activities, a new board game is born: Shift.
On store shelves for just a couple of weeks, Shift was created in Boulder to be a “celebration of life in a box.” Like all games, playing Shift is supposed to be entertaining. But unlike most games, Shift hopes to change the way players live their lives. Using laughter and wisdom as tools, the game seeks to help players realize how their thoughts control their version of reality.
“I wanted people who had never been exposed to this idea to have fun on a Friday night, and then walk away understanding how what they think affects their lives,” explains Nicole Casanova, Shift’s creator.
For Casanova, the idea for Shift came from an instinct to share the most important lessons she has learned in her 31 years. A CU alumna with a master’s degree in integrated marketing communications, Casanova headed west to San Francisco after graduation to work in the world of dot-com. Over time, she grew increasingly frustrated with 80-hour work weeks and began to search for more meaning from her life.
“I had to step up and take responsibility for what happens in my life,” Casanova says.
What she discovered, after a lot of reading and a lot of introspection, is that her thoughts control her experience of the world. So, a shift in her thoughts could shift her perception of the world, and with it, shift her whole life.
Casanova shifted her life, all right. She quit her job in San Francisco, moved back to Boulder, and began to create a more meaningful career for herself. Four years later, Casanova has created Exponential Growth LLC, and its flagship product, Shift.
Though the intention of the game may seem idealistic or at least complex, the rules of the game are not. The team at Exponential Growth has painstakingly reinvented the rules of Shift until the intricate themes of self-growth and empowerment could be packaged in an easy-to-learn board game.
They went so far as to enlist the help of a stand up comedian whose mission was to make big ideas more accessible with humor.
The end result is an artistically crafted board with a collection of pathways looping from one side of the board to the other. Players move from “fear,” the starting area, to “love,” the ending area, and drop all their “defenses,” symbolized with three plastic rings, along the way.
Players move by rolling dice and answering questions correctly. Each question helps players become aware of their thoughts and how these thoughts are connected to love, fear and the rest of their lives.
The questions are sometimes funny, sometimes difficult, and always meant to spawn conversation.
If this description is still baffling, a demo of the game on the company’s Web site www.shiftthegame.com, explains the nuts-and-bolts of play with surprising clarity.
Shift is for sale online and at several Boulder locations including the Boulder Bookstore, McGuckin Hardware, Borders and Atmosphere. While board game junkies of all types may find Shift to be an interesting detour from the regular Milton Bradley fare, Shift is also being used as a tool for corporate team building and therapy because “it can help them go deeper in a less threatening way,” according to Casanova.
Exponential Growth hopes to produce more products in the future beginning with other versions of Shift. Look for an adaptation aimed at teenagers, and one for people who want to dig deeper into the concepts of perception and reality.
For now though, Shift could be an interesting addition to the collections of local gamesters.
“We’re pushing it for New Year’s as a resolution,” Casanova says, “instead of changing your diet, change how you think.”