Board Game Inventor Launches An ​“Artventure”

10 p.m. on a Sunday, and I was walking the length of a small East Rock apartment in the style of the ancient Egyptians (feet pointed out, hips squared), hoping that my pose would be compelling enough to gain the appropriate ​“skill points” it took to get me ahead of three other competitors.

Just moments before, my partner had posed like Caspar David Friedrich’s famed Rückenfigur, wobbling just past the minute mark.

To my right, a colleague’s quick sketch of Fernand Léger’s Three Women still lay on the table.

What brought us to this point wasn’t an interactive lesson in the art history classroom. Instead, we were in the midst of our first stab at Artventures!, a new card and board game designed in 2015 by New Havener Rena Tobey.

When I heard about Artventures! in December, I was skeptical. Six months prior, I’d made the deliberate decision to leave academia and the museum world — if temporarily — for grassroots journalism, because I couldn’t deal with the icky parts of it any more: too white, too elite, too wealthy, too appearance- and network-driven. So, looking at the board for the first time, I bristled slightly at the game’s suggestions of success: opening a major New York museum, landing a big patron or gallery show, having work show up in a paper like The New York Times or Brooklyn Rail. 

But Tobey, whom I first met at a community event a year ago, is a second-career art historian. She went back to school for her BA and MA in the field after a long career in consulting and strategic planning. I admired that. I had gone straight through, and ultimately found too many reasons not to keep going. Tobey was the opposite: she had left a job, seen through all of the nastiness and difficulty of the discipline straight to its joys: creative thinking, robust research, visual analysis and art’s ability to engage almost any community.

Those factors — particularly the last — come through in the game, which rises to her challenge of being ​“funny and delightful and a joy to play.”

While engaging with some of the tougher realities of the field — those few things I initially bristled at — it’s more exciting for the way it gets away from that, rewarding players for giving lectures to school groups, showing their hypothetical artwork in supportive settings, and honing skills like photography and drawing.

As I was playing, the game’s three categories — ​“Artist,” ​“History,” and ​“Action” sprang to life with interactive activities, reminding me why I’d entered classes like ​“Art of the Harlem Renaissance” and ​“Art of the Belle Epoque” with a big, stupid grin on my face and an excitement to read as much as I could about visual culture. There was a moment I learned about the wild, unrestricted joy in close looking — that your world gets bigger when you understand why its citizens made what they made when they made it — and a moment I forgot about it. This nudged me to remember all of the discipline’s redeeming factors.

Tobey gets that. ​“So many people think art is not for them,” she said in an interview with me earlier this month. ​“That it’s weird or unapproachable, stuck-up, condescending. As someone who studies and teaches art history, I want to make it accessible, fun, relevant, and vital. The game just popped in my head one day last March. Really fully formed. Seemed like I didn’t have much of a choice but to go ahead and develop it.”