∞R-The Push Your Luck Trilogy Vol. 2: The Sky Above

See Also:
∞R-The Push Your Luck Trilogy Vol. 1: The Earth Below
∞R-The Push Your Luck Trilogy Vol. 3: What Happens in Vegas...

Despite being disappointed with Inca Gold the allure of a simple push you luck game was persistent. I wanted a push you luck game that was small, simple and allowed for lots of players get involved. But most of all it had to be fun.

While on a business trip in Florida, I stopped into a swanky mall next to my hotel. There was a "designer" toy store there that was in the throes of a going out of business fire sell. Everything was 75% off and they were only taking cash. I browsed around for games and only found one, Cloud Nine. I paid the harried lady behind the counter my four dollars cash and let the place sink into financial ruin.

Components

In a hyphenated word: over-produced. But that’s not really a bad thing since the box is small. The whole presentation is colorful, cartoony and blue. There’s a deck of cards, a long skinny board, a few pawns and a plastic hot air balloon basket for players to ride their way to cloud nine on. What are they going to do there? Acquire points, of course.

The Game

In Cloud nine all the players put a pawn in the balloon basket. Each player takes turns being the Pilot. The Pilot rolls the number of dice shown on the current cloud the balloon is at. Then each player decides whether or not to bail out. The Pilot cannot bail.

If a player bails he gets the points shown on the current cloud. The Pilot then has to discard cards matching his die roll. If he can’t then the balloon crashes to the earth and no one still in the basket gets any points. If he succeeds the balloon moves up to the next level. Cloud 1 is worth 1 point. Cloud 9 is worth 25 points. If the basket hits cloud nine it safely comes back to earth. The higher the cloud the more dice the Pilot will have to roll.

After one player reaches at least 50 points, game over and most points wins.

My Take

At first I really liked Cloud Nine. There’s a strong element of bluff as players try to fake each other out about what’s in their hand. It also plays up to six players which is not as good as Inca Gold/Diamant but still pretty good. But it quickly became a hollow experience.

In Cloud Nine the Pilot can’t bail. It’s fairly easy to track cards in this game and remember what colors a player failed to play in a previous round as Pilot since players only get one card between rounds. So unless a Pilot can hide a Wild card away and psych out the other players into thinking he’s got nothing the Pilot plays the part of whipping boy. Most of the time the game seems to revolve around bailing before you become Pilot.

The card tracking leads to an annoying aspect in the game. If a player lucks into a good lead, playing conservatively becomes a simple matter. Since it’s pretty easy to tell when someone has a good hand or not he can ride with the other players till things look dodgy and then hit the road.

The worst part about the game is the Wild card. A player can choose to discard one Wild card to fulfill the requirement of the dice. This is super powerful but there are only 4 Wilds in the deck. Players who get none are at a serious disadvantage.

According to my reading, the original German version of Cloud Nine included additional rules and a number of special cards that, for simplicity’s sake, were removed from the Out of the Box version. Every single one of these missing pieces seems like it would make the game way better. One of the removed rules allows players to play combination of cards as Wilds. This rule would diffuse the power of Wild cards and make a hand full of one color not such a huge liability. One of the removed special cards allowed a player to force another player out of the balloon. Thus you could actually target a leader who’s playing remora and make things more competitive.

I loved the bluffing aspect of Cloud Nine but it wasn't enough. After several plays Cloud Nine floated away in a math trade and my search for the ideal push your luck game began anew.