D&D meets Monopoly: 'Fantasy' is reality

Take a quick spin around Christian Petersen's office, and it's clear he strikes the perfect balance between comic book geek and up-and-coming executive.

The CEO of Roseville's Fantasy Flight Games has the requisite top-dog tools -- an iPhone and Apple computer -- but his home away from home is also littered with memorabilia and the occasional action figure.

He's a born entrepreneur who started a business importing American board games at the age of 17 while living in Denmark, but he's also a master of perfectionism amid recreation: None of Fantasy Flight's prototype games leave the office without Petersen looking over every detail.

So perhaps it makes perfect sense that the company has become one of the world's 10 largest hobby game publishers with a mix of international partnerships and carefully honed cachet with the gamer crowd.

"He's 35 years old, and he's running a multimillion-dollar company," said Jeremy Stomberg, who has worked in Fantasy Flight's marketing department for two years. "I would act the same way if I were him."

The Roseville publisher owns the English-language rights to the "Lord of the Rings" board game series, has scored a number of its own hits and has a movie based on one of its games that it hopes will be picked up by a cable network later this year.

It has partnerships in more than half a dozen countries worldwide, turning more than a third of its revenue either from publishing games abroad or securing rights to publish international games in the U.S.

Those arrangements helped Fantasy Flight cross the $8 million mark in annual revenues for the first time last year, and the company's projections have it growing substantially for the next several years.

"A lot of people think entrepreneurship is just a quest for money," Petersen said. "That's certainly part of it. But for me, it's more about making something happen."

When Petersen started the company, though, there wasn't much good happening.

'Many dark tunnels'

The St. Olaf College graduate incorporated Fantasy Flight Games in 1995 with three employees, $150,000 in seed capital and the plan to import European books and games. He'd burned through much of the money in little over a year.

He was the company's only employee by 1996, and probably would have scrapped the business if he didn't have such a reverence for how the game is played.

"There were many dark tunnels to go through. It takes a certain tenacity to walk in the dark," he said. "I felt an obligation to the people who invested money. It didn't feel right to walk away."

The company finally scored a hit in 1997 with Disk Wars (a board game using cardboard disks to build an army), and slowly started to acquire the rights for board-game versions of popular computer game franchises like World of Warcraft.

It publishes 60 to 65 new products a year, adding those to an arsenal of 30 to 40 older games that are still reliable sellers.

And while Petersen has a major interest in new forms of media, he also realizes the market for old-fashioned entertainment hasn't exactly been lost in a sea of 1s and 0s.

"It's one of the great doom-and-gloom stories, that video games will kill hobby games," he said. "There are certain genres within hobby games that ebb and flow. But people realize what board games can do."

Both Petersen and Stomberg said Fantasy Flight's success has come somewhat from people realizing there's only so much time they can spend in front of a video screen.

That said, they know the company has to keep trying new concepts to evolve.

Fortunately, Fantasy Flight has a leader who's never been short on innovation -- or a love for the subject material.

"My grandparents got me 'Dungeons & Dragons' as a kid. My dad had to read it and learn how to play it," Petersen said. "Games foster that friendly environment. We gravitate away from that, but board games kept coming back."

Ben Goessling • 651-298-1546