My girlfriend and I love to play Lost Cities. It is a great two-player game, short, with simple and elegant rules. It is a lot deeper than it seems and there are many agonizing decisions to be made during the course of a game.
But even a great game like Lost Cities becomes a bit boring after you play it for the xx-th time, so I was looking for another fun 2-player game.
After reading some reviews about Balloon Cup it seemed like it would fit the bill perfectly. It
Thanks for the review. I haven
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That
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That would be even more elegant solution (although not practical in this game). The decision which way to rounding halves always gives me headaches when designing games. Same goes for deciding what any tiebreakers should be.
I hate designing "tiebreaker" mechanics too! We should start a separate thread to discuss the various ways of dealing with those kinds of situations. The ideal thing, I guess, is to have people having such large quantities of whatever is being compared that the chances of ties are miniscule. Turn order related stuff also works, but only pushes the problem back one level of abstraction, as then you have to figure out how to assign turn order!
-Jeff
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21-05-2003 at 15:14, jwarrend wrote:
I hate designing "tiebreaker" mechanics too! We should start a separate thread to discuss the various ways of dealing with those kinds of situations. The ideal thing, I guess, is to have people having such large quantities of whatever is being compared that the chances of ties are miniscule. Turn order related stuff also works, but only pushes the problem back one level of abstraction, as then you have to figure out how to assign turn order!
-Jeff
How about instead of breaking the tie, just deal with it. I.E. instead of trying some half-baked idea of breaking ties, just assign a consequence to a tie. For example, in a hidden bidding game, suppose two people bid the same for something. The consequence could be that neither get the item (I.E. the bids cancel each other out). This is particularly nasty if the item goes to the next highest bidder. For example, two people bid 10, one person bids 1. The person who bid 1 gets the item b/c the two 10s cancel each other out. This is particularly devastating if the item is highly valuable (as in this case, the person got the item for only 1). I think systems where the tie is dealt with
I would be fascinated to hear designer Stephen Glenn
Oh dear - this is totally the wrong thread for a discussion of blind bidding systems.
Tell you what, I
Not my cup of tea. It's completely abstract and there's a little too much luck involved. Lost Cites, another game mentioned on this thread, is far more elegant and much more fun.
Ouch guys! Snoop the creator of balloon cup, does visit here sometimes... Please give him the same respect you would give any of the other designers whose games you may review (whether it be in the GDW or here in the review sections).
-Darke
I find Balloon Cup to be a better game than lost cities. It is certainly getting more play in our family at that moment than lost cities. I don't think it is true at all that it is a purely tactical game. If you can count cards at all then you can plan quite some way ahead, knowing that certain cards are going to sit in the discard pile for a while. As with lost cities there is a strong element of luck to the game, the strategy comes in as you try to mitigate that luck.
Do you mostly try for the big hops or the small hops? The big hops are a bigger risk, but the small hops can give a quicker return with a lower risk. Do you use this high card to guarantee a win on that two hop or to greatly improve your chances at winning the four hop? Do you go for the grey and blue cups which require less cubes, but for which there are fewer cubes and fewer cards available or do you go for the red cup which has more cubes and cards available but requires more cubes. To some extent you have to be opportunistic (which makes the game strongly tactical), but you also have ot play the odds in a strategic way if you want to win.
The ability to play a card either to your side or to the opponents side means that you are much less often frustrated by a bad draw of the cards than you are in Lost Cities. A bad hand with balloon cup is a hand full of middle of the road cards. In lost cities you seem to more often get a hand that is very difficult to do anything with - investment cards for one suit and low valued expedition cards for another (or worse still one or two high valued expedition cards for another suit).
Many commentators have said that 'Balloon Cup' is purely abstract. I personally wouldn't see that as a great problem, but I think the game does have some of the elements of the theme. Hot air ballooning involves decisions about what altitude you will fly at. Do I go up or down to find the good winds? A bit of a stretch perhaps, but in the end all that really matters is whether the game is fun to play. I find that it is.
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I must say that I thought that I would really like the game, because of all the good reviews and the description of the game. I didn