Peace of Art

Starry Night - Dreamscape

Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night was painted in September 1888 in Southern France and sent it to his brother, Theo, with some other paintings in September 1889. It is currently in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and has been since 1941. It is one of van Gogh’s most popular and recognizable pieces.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/ea/Van_Gogh_-_Starry_Night_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg/300px-Van_Gogh_-_Starry_Night_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg

Originally van Gogh did not like the painting, he wrote to his brother:

“The olives with white clouds and background of mountains, also the moonrise and the night effects, these are exaggerations from the point of view of arrangement, their lines are warped as that of old wood.”

http://www.webexhibits.org/vangogh/letter/20/607.htm

An interesting fact about this painting is that although it is a painting of the night landscape van Gogh painted it from memory during the day! This may not seem like such a big deal when the mountains, the landscape and the village were all right outside his window; but when I think about the colours he also had to remember, the dark blues of the mountain and just the difference the nighttime atmosphere can create and how well he replicated it, it’s pretty amazing!

The game:

To turn this amazing piece of artwork into an artistic game, myself and the rest of the Sharpie Farms group decided to make a kind of relaxed collection game based on the agreed peaceful feeling we felt this painting portrayed.

The pieces and their movement:

To achieve a feeling of peace we decided that the game movement should have a free-floating feel. We designed clouds to represent the game pieces and we gave the game a few simple mechanics to affect the player’s movement. These mechanics start with a player drawing a card:

• On this card is something they have to describe, it might be a sheep, a cloud or a waterfall but the player that draws it has to describe it.
• Once it’s described, the player to the left has two chances to guess.
•  If they don’t guess it the guessing continues clockwise.
• If no players guess a card’s description correctly, the player who is describing it can either to lose 1 star or be unable to participate in the next guessing phase (Player will be unable to guess the object on the next card is being described. If the Player elects to lose a star, they place their star on the current node they are on.  To pick this star up again, they must mode off the node then back on).
• That card then gets put into the discard pile and the player on the left draws a card.

• If a player guesses correctly they get to move 1 node in any direction. They then draw a card to try and describe to the other players.

We thought that this would bring a calm feeling to the game to get players to describe calm things. We also liked that it adds a type of movement other than dice.

The board:

For the design of our game we took the starry night painting and thought we could make it an even “starrier” night by adding the full Milky Way galaxy. Following that, we used a silver pen to create the nodes and the paths between nodes. We highlighted the starting nodes (in the village) with blue marker and the nodes that stars will be placed on with red marker.

We also gave the stars and the photo of the galaxy a blurring filter to try and match the brush strokes in van Gogh’s painting and I think it helped to bridge the gap between the painting and the photo.

I hope everyone who plays will feel calm and relaxed, while still having some fun collecting stars right out of their own starry night.