Midnight Party 1/3 : Oh Look, An Art Project.

Introduction

So I've mentioned Midnight Party a few times now in recent posts. This game was very much a kid's game (supports ages 4 and up) from 1989. It was designed by Wolfgang Kramer, who years later would create several games of greater popularity (like El Grande, The Princes of Florence, Torres, Colosseum, Category 5, and his Mask Trilogy of games).

The box (above) and rules were destroyed by water. You can
see some of the damage on the upper part of the box.

I remembered liking Midnight Party fondly as a kid, probably because of the wonderful theme and simple rules behind the game. The ghost in the game (Hugo) has a birthday party, and all the players control guests playing hide and seek with him for 3 rounds. When Hugo comes out from the cellar everybody needs to find a room to hide in for points. Those captured by Hugo receive penalty points.

Early sketch, just playing around. [Instagram]

While I don't think this game holds up 100% over time (it's a fairly random game), I like a few aspects of it. The pieces are well made, and for its time the board projected the theme very well. Additionally, I like that it works for 2-8 players, which is a rarity in a lot of board games.

The pieces that were still good were:

• Hugo the Ghost
• Ghost die (d6 with 1, 2, 4, 5 and 2 Ghost faces replacing the 3 and 6)
• 30 Guests
• 6 Blue and Red (for a 2+ player game)
• 5 Turquoise (for a 3+ player game)
• 4 Yellow (for a 4+ player game)
• 3 Black (for a 5+ player game)
• 2 Purple, Green, White (for a 6-8 player game)

Design

The only thing I really need to rework is the game board. The problem is that I really want this to be as visually captivating of a game as I can make it. In order to do this I started taking one approach, and then started along a secondary one. Neither are finished yet, but I think enough process has been hashed out to at least start talking about these designs. I plan to complete both designs in the future.

I took general and detailed pictures of the board to
try and capture as much detail as possible.
(The upper left part was in pretty bad shape though)

Initially I wanted to make a basic paper replication of the game, so I could have a quintessential board to work off of like I did for Pipeline. Nothing really amazing with that - paper and Rapidograph pen as usual.

Game board with some measurements and added notes.

Some board/box sketches.
above: assembled, below: separated.

As I was looking at it though, I recalled how I always wished the cellar on the board was more like an actual cellar - with some depth and character built in. Given this thought, I set to work on making a box for this quartered board, so when opened, the room panels could lay across the box and the inside act as the cellar.

I sketched out some ideas on how to accomplish this kind of presentation and eventually came up with the idea on the right. Pretty much the idea is to try and have a shallow box for pieces to keep the cellar from being so steep that pieces can't stay on the tilt.

I got some wood and additional components from Home Depot and then went to Michael's for some Acrylic paint to paint the boards with. I figured since this painting part would probably take the most time, I should start looking into getting a heads start on it. I chose acrylic paint because I knew it would provide bold colors and dry quickly, but it had also been at least a decade since I cracked open acrylic paint.

Revelation

I was looking at some canvases to practice painting with acrylics on and then it hit me: For some games, I could paint the boards on canvas and store them as such. It was a fascinating idea - the board as art and the pieces stored behind the canvas. I'm sure some of the inspiration came from getting CO2 recently (the watercolor look is beautifully striking), but I think a majority of the idea game from Solarquest. Up until this point I was considering learning how to make my own [typical] game board (this still may occur), but the idea of working tirelessly on painting a board that would just get stored in a box seemed a little demoralizing.

I picked up a 10"x20" canvas and got started on another game board for Midnight Party testing this idea out (I used Midnight Party because its board is both smaller and more difficult than the Solarquest board - pretty sure I can paint planets). Here are the results after each round of painting so far:

Round 1 (Basic layout)

Round 2 (Early text and detail)

While not yet complete, I think these can kinda show how I'm thinking this could work. Furthermore I think if I can add something that would allow pieces/rules to be stored behind the canvas (without much increase in weight), this may be a really neat way to present games to people. "Hey, you want to play chess? Here, let me pull it off the wall for you."

Game pieces on canvas. See an unnecessary autoawesomed
version of this at the bottom of this, courtesy of Google+ .

In the end, I think it's a really neat idea for board games - and for art. Art for me has really escalated more and more toward pretentiousness and elitism in a way that saddens me. I personally don't think that brand of art has much higher to climb though; my two most recent New York trips had MoMA highlighting artists that were either reviewed in their own Ivory Towers, or "Gimmicky Diversions". I've come to appreciate more of the less pretentious art over the years, and I feel the more sincere pieces can hold up better in time and appreciation. In my lifetime I'd love to see an artist with the passion of Van Gogh over the extravagance of Dali for instance.

Conclusion

So initially I had one board idea and game out with two. My intention at this point is to complete the canvas version in the near future and look at a Solarquest board next (unless something else catches my eye more). On the side, I'm hoping to construct my initial box and board design, although I know there's more construction involved in this one.

Bonus: Unnecessary Autoawesome

Google+ has an effect called "Autoawesome" that gets applied to a sequence of similar pictures taken over a short timeframe. While I find them distracting to the post, it's kinda fun to see what they do. So here you go.

I guess it's a good way to see that these pieces do, in fact,
have three dimensions.

It was hypnotic enough that I felt the need to add it in.