"Compute!" presented opposing views of the game in May 1988. The magazine included "Balance of Power" in its list of "Our Favorite Games", calling it "an impressive recreation of the world's geopolitical landscape ... call one too many bluffs and you'll see the chilling message "You have ignited a nuclear war"". Orson Scott Card, however, wrote in his review of the game that Crawford—"the best designer of simulation games I've seen"—was "leaning over your shoulder and bullying you into playing the game his way. He has a sweet delusion that as long as the United States is very nice and doesn't do anything to offend them, the Russians will go home. And if you don't play that way, why, he'll stop the game with a nasty remark about how the world was just destroyed by nuclear war". He added that since no nuclear war had been fought Crawford could not know what would cause one, and "there are a lot of experts who claim that the Soviets seem to behave a lot nicer when we stand up to them than when we disarm", but that " is so sure he's right that "Balance of Power" isn't a game, it's propaganda".