Editorial Product Review:Item Description:BRIDGE BARON 19 BY GREAT GAMES -
Product Availability: unknown
More related to this product:
click for more
More related to this product:
Buyer Reviews
Average Buyer Rating:
-
Bridge Baron 18 User Interface
Bridge Baron 18 has unified interface for Mac and Windows screen shots can be found at www.greatgameproducts.com. This is the most comprehensive and user friendly bridge game on the market. We have heard complains about missing learning utility on the Mac disk. The program that is referenced is a free Learn and Play Bridge utility from the ACBL organization, we have it on our CD as an ad-on, it can be freely downloaded from the ACBL website too. Unfortunately the publisher does not have a Mac version of it.
Customer Rating: -
Bridge Baron 17
Bridge Baron 17 is a quality bridge application that lends itself to training and improving your play. It has good graphics and is easy to operate in any mode of play. I especially like the fact that if I don't want to play the hand that is dealt, I can quickly move to another deal of the cards. Although this application is not cheap, I feel it offers good value for the cost and will be enjoyed by beginner, intermediate and advanced players.
Customer Rating: 
-
Hideous graphics
I also own the same company's Bridge game called Bridge Butler and it's graphics are infinitely better - why they can't take those graphics and use them on this much-more-expensive game, I have no idea.
The graphics on Baron are almost unuseable and these programmers should be ashamed. Maybe they'll be able to do better once they graduate from high school...
update - I just got a nasty email from the makers of this software essentially saying "You didn't like this one? Well, we've got a new better version coming out soon and you're stupid for not calling us to find out about it but you'll still have to pay for an upgrade, and you were stupid for dealing with Amazon... so there!"
Sheesh...
Customer Rating: 
-
macintosh version - bad graphics, bad interface
I have been using the Macintosh OSX version of Bridge Baron 16 for about a year. I don't know if the problems with that version have been fixed by version 17, but one would think that version 16 of a program would be fairly polished...
As other reviews have mentioned, the graphics on this program are horrific. That isn't terribly important to me, though. The program does have excellent capabilities -- a large number of conventions and levels of play, more features than most other programs, etc. However, the user interface makes using these features painful. For example, if you want to add conventions, you have to do that one convention at a time using a cumbersome interface to select conventions. You can't add multiple conventions at once, and you have to add conventions separately for each direction (i.e., there is no option to apply the same conventions to both east/west and north/south -- you have to select each of them individually for both). Other examples of bad interface design include the inability to quickly replay a hand after doing the "duplicate" scoring. If you happened to write down the deal number you could regenerate it, but it would be better to be able to try replaying the hand right away after getting a sense for what bridge baron could make on a given contract. Imagine you just miss making a 4S contract, and bridge baron's duplicate mode claims to have made it. It'd be nice to be able to replay the hand to see if you could do better. It's possible to do that, but it's cumbersome. Although these sorts of shortcomings are minor, they add to a poor user experience, and like the graphics, they are not the sorts of problems that should be present in a program this established (16 versions!).
I haven't used the program on a PC, so it might be better there, but on the Mac, the interface is bad and the program also has some stability issues. For example, sometimes when clicking on the menus, the program freezes for up to a minute. I regularly find myself switching to a different application while waiting for Bridge Baron to respond. Note that this isn't waiting for the program to decide on the appropriate bid or play -- it's just waiting for the menus to work. Occasionally, I have had to force quit the application entirely. Unfortunatey, there are not many other alternatives for the macintosh.
I gave the program 2 stars because it has such excellent features, conventions, etc. It can't get higher than that without dramatically improving the user experience. I hope they have done so on version 17, but the fact that they haven't done so after 16 versions gives me little reason to think that the version 17 will be much better (and the program history does not mention fixing these issues).
