last this balloon would really make it! You can imagine how exciting it was when it looked as if the balloon might actually fly over us here in California. Unfortunately it turned out that they chose winds which took them over Baja California instead. But incredibly, they actually did complete the first around-the-world trip on March 20, 1999, eventually coming to land in Egypt.
      But even before then we had noticed that this might make a nice topic for our own game, something I had been wanting to do for years. Besides the obvious romance and color of ballooning, the real-life strategies and choices that the balloonists were making reminded us very strongly of a game. Gas, fuel and ballast are limited resources which they have to husband carefully, but sometimes they gamble and expend large amounts very quickly in order to catch the right wind. Moreover it turns out that the winds themselves break themselves down into two or three jet streams or, in game terms, different strategic paths. The various disasters that had occurred over the years just looked like pre-made Event Cards. The clincher was that Tanya, a trained artist, offered to help us with the graphics so we crossed our fingers and thought we would give it a try.
      BOULDER GAMES: How did it come to be produced?
      RICK HELI: Our original ideas have changed somewhat in the final game. However, it is surprising how much of the original conception has remained. The scheme of the map, the idea of balloons flying at three different levels and all of the cards have survived almost entirely intact from the first flash of inspiration. While the first idea was to encompass not just a race, but the meta-race of finding funding and experimenting with technology (those who know the game LIFT OFF! will recognize the type), we decided to keep things simple and simply depict a race itself. (Actually we may yet do a such a scenario add-on as the situation still intrigues me.) We felt that this should help make the game more interesting for the game-buying audience at Essen where we had planned to present the game from the very beginning. But we didn't want to entirely lose the theme of the game in favor of mechanics. After over a decade of playing games together, Phil and I had developed an unspoken shared goal for the kind of game we wanted. The theme should come first and the mechanisms, while still profiting from principles such as those put forward in this very nice article by Wolfgang Kramer, should subjugate themselves to this. Of course it still needs to be fun! And some license could be taken for the sake of the game. Contrary winds and Misfortune Cards which in our game are generated not by luck but by players, are examples of this. But overall we tried to make something recognizable to actual balloonists. Also, it was our hope that by the end of the game the players should have learned something, not just about how to play it well, but also about the topic it depicts. We are not the first to attempt such a synthesis and some have even given a name to it, "third generation games", but it was and still is something we look for in games, both for design and play.
      The initial setup had the six balloons each starting from a different start line and was actually more of a bluffing game. Players held five cards and each turn played one face down into the sector of their choice. This card would affect every balloon in the sector. It could be quite dicey for the leader to know whether to play a card to counteract a possibly hostile wind played on him or whether to hold off because if it was a bluff, he would just hurt himself. While this approach seemed to go through several tests fairly well, it seemed tedious and exacting to figure out the turn order before every card play. But this was necessary to make a leader catchable. The mechanism also seemed to encourage a lot of bashing of others,