Balance of Power is a strategy video game of geopolitics during the Cold War, created by Chris Crawford and published in 1985 on the Macintosh by Mindscape, followed by ports to a variety of platforms over the next two years.

In the game, the player takes the role of the President of the United States or General Secretary of the Soviet Union.

The player may choose to be either the President of the United States or the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and must lead the chosen superpower for eight years, seeking to maximize "prestige" and avoiding a nuclear war.

His smash hit Eastern Front (1941) made him one of the few game authors known by name, and helped ensure later releases were also successful to a degree.

At the time this was a non-trivial decision, as there were no development tools; programmers had to buy an Apple Lisa to write code for the platform.

'"[3][4] By May the initial concept was fleshed out; the game would take place on top of a world map that could show various details,[5] events would be presented as newspaper stories following an algorithmic concept he developed after considering the headlines in National Enquirer,[6] and these events and their outcomes would be expressed in terms of "prestige points".

Crawford had difficulty in finding a publisher for Balance of Power, due in no small part to the lingering effects of the 1983 crash.

Random House eventually agreed to publish it, but there was considerable ill will between Crawford and the editor assigned to him, who had no prior experience with video games.

Random House ultimately cancelled the contract and demanded that Crawford return its $10,000 advance payment, almost causing him to lose his home.

The fame was in no small part helped by a review in The New York Times Magazine written by David L. Aaron, Jimmy Carter's Deputy Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, who called it "about as close as one might get to the cut-and-thrust of international politics without going through confirmation by the Senate.

[10] In 1986, Crawford published a book, also called Balance of Power, which details the internals of the game great depth.

It explains the background of the politics, the formulas used to calculate prestige and related parameters, and an account of its (lengthy) gestation.

[11] Around 2013, Crawford released source code of several of his games into the public domain[citation needed], including Balance of Power.

[20] Info gave the Amiga version four-plus stars out of five, approving of the complex gameplay with a good user interface.

While still criticizing geopolitical "absurdities" such as forcing the United States to passively accept Soviet troops in Syria (contrary to what happened during the Yom Kippur War) and advisors in Mexico or start nuclear war, Card now concluded that such outcomes probably reflected computer limitations rather than Crawford's political views.

He advised players to pretend that Balance of Power was set on an alien planet "astonishingly similar" to Earth, and to play solely based on the game's assumptions about the world.

[26] Chuck Moss disagreed with Card's revised view, describing Balance of Power in Computer Gaming World in 1992 as "reflect[ing] extreme bias on the part of [its] designers".

and some disagree with the politics, the AI in Balance of Power, combined with its unique play style, make it a classic.

[30] After Balance of Power, Crawford began work on an entirely new game, Trust & Betrayal: The Legacy of Siboot, released in 1987 and selling only a few thousand copies.

[33] Balance of Power has been the basis for a number of play-by-mail versions, manually run and based on moves posted in internet forum systems.