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I purchased Balmy Balloonists before I got married, so that must have been just about the time the game was released. I don't know where I purchased it. It is a self-published game by BGG's own Rick Heli and Phil Vogt and was probably issued in small quantity, as the back of the box is numbered (in this case, #83).
The theme, as you might expect, is a balloon race. It's interesting that balloon racing is such a popular game theme (Balloon Cup, The Great Balloon Race, Montgolfiere, and surely others) when it's not exactly a popular real world activity. ESPN will televise spelling bees and Magic: the Gathering competitions, yet I can't say that I've seen balloon racing on that network.
Components
You get a lot of stuff in the box.
- playing pieces are little plastic balloons which can be attached to disk-shaped "risers" to indicate their altitude (ground, low, medium, or high)
- cards are perforated cardstock which are sufficient for a game such as this (ie, one that won't be played every week multiple times); you get cards for local winds, Northern hemisphere quadrant prevailing winds, advantages, and whammies (which the designer/publisher calls "misfortune")
- a gameboard and colored tokens; the board is not mounted, but is laminated. Thus, it will not lie flat on the table, which is particularly problematic for the "windrose" tokens (little pawns that sit at the dead center of the board, where four ridges and valleys meet). The little tokens are thin plastic disks and are used to indicate fuel, gas (helium), and ballast (BGGers who complain, just kidding).
- you also get two little grey pawns which sit on the windrose mentioned above and a storm marker which is necessary for an optional rule and six baggies to hold the six colors of playing pieces plus appropriate plastic disks for each player. You need to supply two additional baggies to hold the decks of cards
The components are nice, particularly for home-grown production. However, they're overkill. From the picture of the map above, you can see that things get cluttered very quickly. While the discs are cute, they're unnecessary, as players could track their fuel, gas, and ballast expenditures on paper or even on a communal resource track. Maybe if they'd just used little plastic cubes (the size of El Grande cubes), the Clutter Factor could have been mitigated. In hindsight, I wonder if the publisher thinks smaller resource tokens and a mounted board (or even a single-piece rolled board) would have made for a better playing experience.
Finally, the game begs for player color identifier tokens. The only pieces in the game which are associated with a player's color are the balloon and three risers. Oft times, all four of those pieces are on the board, leaving opponents to wonder who is playing "red" or "blue." I know, plenty of people will say, "It's not that hard to remember who is blue." True enough. But this game is designed for players to play two colors (unless you have four or more players). When one player is playing the role of two different colors, it gets confusing fast. "Which color am I moving now--the one on my left--is that the yellow or the black?"
Rules
The rules are straightforward, but not particularly well-written. It appears that this game was specifically targeted to attempt to find a major German game company to reprint it, as German is the first language used on the box and in the rulebook. Is it possible that retranslating to English made for slightly less-readible rules?
Anyway, each turn, a player's color does the following, in order:
1) Play a local wind card. These cards are played from your hand to the table face-up in front of you. Each such card shows the three levels of ascent (low, medium, and high). Beside each level is a picture showing which direction and how far you move (two northwest, one southeast, or no move at all). This allows you to "change lanes" as the board is divided into five lanes from Lane 1 (near the arctic circle) to Lane 5 (near the Equator). If prevailing winds (see later) are favorable in a different lane, you want to play a local wind card to move you to those better lanes.
Note: these icons are confusing. You'll see two little lane spaces with an arrow, which indicates movement of only one space. Iconic references are a systemic problem with this game.
This is all fine, you use the winds at your disposal to get into the proper lane so that you move quickly in this race. However, there's a special kludge in this game to force interactivity/conflict. Once you've got three cards lying on the table in front of you, you're not allowed to play from your hand to the table as described above. Instead, you must play from the three cards in front of you to the discard pile and the effect shown on the card you discard must be applied to an opponent (and only one of two opponents, as noted on the constantly-changing windrose in the middle of the board). For instance, you may have a card you played awhile ago that shows one north drift for low-level flying, no movement for mid-level, and two southern lane movements from the high-level. You discard this and must play it on either yellow or black (if that's what the windrose says). If you are, in fact, yellow or black, you can't play it on yourself. So, you affect someone else's movement with your discard.
This part feels very Mille Bornes-ish to me. You're not attempting to help yourself at all with this maneuver, but instead are just fiddling with someone else's best laid plans. Furthermore, there is often a "?" at the bottom of the card you are discarding. When that is present, you can choose not to push your opponent's balloon around with wind but, instead, flip over the next "whammie" (misfortune) card from the deck to see what ill befalls them. They could have a mechanical malfunction (like, running out of gas or having a flat tire in Mille Bornes) or they could encounter bad weather. Whatever, it won't be good. There is a chance that they will be able to counter this misfortune with one of their precious two "Advantage" cards they were dealt at the start of the game ("Coup fourre!"). Otherwise, they often lose a turn or something like that. Aleternatively, there could be a little Trivial Pursuit pie-piece icon at the bottom of the card you discard. In that case, you can choose to change the prevailing winds card in the target player's quadrant (often your own quadrant).
Speaking of the cards, this is a good time to mention that the game, in an attempt to be language-independent, went overboard on the icons and many of them just miss completely, making us wonder what it was supposed to mean. See below for some examples:
2) Move your balloon up or down. You can spend some of your gas or ballast to lower or rise your balloon, which you indicate by adding or removing risers below your playing piece.
3) Move forward on the board. In each quadrant of the board is a prevailing winds card or current or jet stream or something like that. What it shows is movement for any of the 15 combinations of player position (Lane 1 through 5, height low, medium, or high). Cross-reference your current position with the card and move accordingly. The card could say you move backwards 1 or forward 5 or pretty much anything in between.
4) Check to see if you have to throw away tokens (either because you're out of gas chips or because you're flying high and don't want to waste ballast on your next turn, in which case you toss a fuel now)
5) If you played a local wind card from your hand this turn, replenish it from the draw deck.
That's it. You adjust your balloon throughout the game to try to be first to circle the globe.
Our Game (2-player, each playing two ballons)
First let me tell you what we didn't do. We didn't play nasty. This game seems to be geared for those who enjoy "take that"/Mille Bornes style games where you are constantly pushing your adversaries back. We didn't do that. Not that we're against it, but it sure makes for a long game if everyone is losing turns or being forced up into the Arctic (where you go back a ways) or down to the Equator (where you lose turns until you draw the proper card). In 1978, I would have loved that aspect of the game, as I had long periods of time to while away around the gameboard. But now, turning a 90 minute game into a two-hour-plus affair just isn't my idea of fun. So, we didn't ever push an opponent off the board though we did use "whammie" cards once or twice if we had to.
Essentially, we played the best cards we could for the first three turns, raising and lowering our balloons and letting local winds blow us into the proper lane to move forward. My white balloon built up a big lead while my black balloon lingered with the other two (my wife's). The rules state that it's the first to get both balloons across the finish who wins the game.
After three turns of this, we had to start playing table cards on other people. As we were playing two colors each, this often meant that we could give a boost to our other color, rather than having to play Dastardly Dan and harm an opponent. Usually, if we couldn't help our alternate color, we discarded to alter the prevailing winds, rather than issue a whammie (misfortune) or move an opponent's balloon off course.
Then the game dragged. The game is quite repetitive (even when you use whammies, which usually made my wife lose a turn, as it turned out). I think some of the short scenarios (trans-Atlantic flight, e.g.) might be better choices for us, as they could be concluded more rapidly. But that wouldn't save the set-up time and fiddle time of moving tokens around and flipping through cards. In short, the game bogs down and is not only repetitive, but fiddly-repetitive. A lot like the hand-jive in Grease. You're not only playing the game, but you're playing a card, putting that deck down (because you're playing two colors), tossing away chips to rise, adjusting risers under the balloons, moving the balloon, grabbing another chip to discard, drawing a card to put with the proper color's hand, and then starting the process again for your other color.
It took 90 minutes to complete. For the record, I won, but in fact, we both won.
Verdict
I doubt this one will hit the table again, so it's on the trade heap at BGG (if I can get a new copy of Sixmix, otherwise, eBay awaits). I think that it could be a good game by reducing the fiddly components and, for my tastes, ditching the "take that" elements. It feels like playing Liftoff! or the afore-mentioned Mille Bornes. If you invest in playing dozens of times (as the designers no-doubt did), you can get a lot of mileage out of it, by directly attacking opponents or letting "the fates" do that for you. But I suspect the games would run quite awhile, and I just don't have the time or patience for that anymore. I guess I've grown to dislike games where one loses turns, rather than simply has to choose alternate options for a couple of turns.
If I were to play again, I'd eliminate the whammie and Advantage cards completely. I'd also do away with the windrose markers. I'd have only one type of token (15 to 18 of 'em to each player) which can be used to raise or lower the balloon prior to movement--I just don't see need for tracking three resources in this game). After three cards have been played to the board, I'd allow players to discard them to affect either the prevailing winds cards or to move their own or their other color's balloon or just to discard them period. There would be no direct conflict other than adjustment of the prevailing winds cards. In fact, that appeals to me and I may have give that a go before passing the game along.
The curmudgeon has spoken, so be the word.
Posted Mon Oct 15, 2007 5:13 pm
