Tabletop_Gaming__April_2019

tabletopgaming.co.uk 9

ANDREW PARKS

e designer of Dungeon Alliance and Assault of the

Giants on his 2003 debut Ideology: e War o f Ideas

FIRST TURN

said, ‘is is really

dierent,’ and while

we were playing it Tom

Slizewski of InQuest Gamer

magazine came by. en about a month later I

got a call from Zev Shlasinger of Z-Man Games. He

said, ‘What’s this Ideology game Tom told me he

saw you demoing?’ He wanted to see it. So I went

to Zev’s house and played it on his kitchen table,

and he said, ‘I’m going to print this.’ Wow.”

HOW TO PLAY

“Each player is one of the ve chief

ideologies of the 20th century: capitalism,

communism, fascism, imperialism and

Islamic fundamentalism. You have one

region on the board that you begin with and new

regions keep coming out in a random order. ese are

worth one, two or three points, based on their level of

inuence in the world. You’re all trying to inuence

them with three dierent types of resources, and

each ideology has special powers that allow them to

manipulate certain types of inuence. e rst person

to get to 12 global region points wins the game.”

END OF THE GAME

“It’s a awed game that I’m very proud of. e very rst

review I got was in German and I had to use Google

Translate to gure out it was a negative review. But a lot of

people did like it and it got a very good response at Essen.

Zev sold all the copies that he was able to get over there,

which was very exciting, and the game sold out in nine

or 10 months. e second printing didn’t do as well,

but I’m still so happy because now there is this really

much nicer looking edition of my rst-ever design.”

STRATEGY TIPS

“I teach game design and one of the things I tell my

students is, ‘You’re not selling a game, you’re selling

yourself.’ In other words, don’t fall in love with your

own creation because you’re going to hate it in a year

or two. Just try to establish that you have the right skills

and abilities and then eventually you’ll sell a game.”

BACKGROUND

“It was a long path of failure, my friend. I had always

enjoyed game design. Over the years I made a lot of

homebrew variations of games with my friends – we

played an inordinate amount of Talisman. en in 1998 I

was a stay-at-home dad and, when I wasn’t watching my

daughters, I tried to work on various projects. So I spent

ve years trying to get one of my designs published: a

Lord of the Rings card game called Doom, a similar card

game called Lords of Eternity, e Venture Card Game,

which you can still download on BoardGameGeek

and which became an Arthurian game called Camelot

Adventures [later released as Camelot Legends]. But after

four years I was still an unpublished designer with no

prospects. However, after 9/11, I’d started working on

Ideology – something I had no intention of pitching...”

COMPONENTS

“Like many other people, I was so blindsided by 9/11 I felt I

knew nothing about how the world worked. I really wanted

to understand the dierent ideas that formed everything

that happened in the 20th century and culminated in

this event. So I started doing research, watching a lot of

documentaries, a lot of stu on the Afghanistan War of the

’80s and all these other things that I kind of knew, but didn’t

really understand how they all linked together. I created

Ideology as a way of combining dierent concepts of the

20th century in such a way that would make sense for me.”

OBJECT

“I wanted to make something that used more streamlined

mechanics than the Ameritrash games I was brought up

on. So I knew I didn’t want to make a game like Risk; I

wanted it to have a more European feeling to it. e whole

thing was sort of a thought experiment. It’s an abstract

game. Not very theme-based like most of my later games.”

SETUP

“By this time I was remote playtesting games, including

[publisher] Decipher’s collectible card games. Decipher

used to have this really awesome event called Decipher-

Con. I was there in the fall of 2002, helping to demo their

Austin Powers game, and one evening I broke out my

prototype for Ideology: e War of Ideas. e other players

Interview by Dan Jolin

April 2019

The whole thing was sort of

a thought experiment.

ANDREW PARKS

said, ‘is is really

dierent,’ and while

we were playing it Tom

Slizewski of InQuest Gamer

magazine came by. en about a month later I

got a call from Zev Shlasinger of Z-Man Games. He

said, ‘What’s this IdeologyIdeologyIdeology game Tom told me he game Tom told me he

saw you demoing?’ He wanted to see it. So I went

to Zev’s house and played it on his kitchen table,

and he said, ‘I’m going to print this.’ Wow.”

HOW TO PLAY