The program is generally very good-it does all the things you would expect and does them well. You can set lots of preferences, review and replay hands, save hands, learn and practice new bidding conventions. The program generally bids pretty well when you are playing solo, but the hints are not always reliable.

However, the graphics look pitifully cheap and unappealing. For a program that costs as much as this one does, you expect something much, much better in appearance. 3 stars

the mac version of this software is missing the bridge tutorial--the whole reason i was purchasing it. this fact was not clear in the information about the product. 2 stars

The program is very helpful in giving the user lots of effective practice time, and this is great for improving one's play. I have found that playing in the DUPLICATE mode increases your improvement, because it allows you to compare how you play with how the computer plays the same hand. This is the best way to see what mistakes you make, or conversely what you do that is better than the computer's play, and use that newly-gained knowledge in future play.

The graphics for this program are pathetic, given its cost. In fact, the graphics for Bridge Baron 1 are vastly superior to those for Bridge Baron 17. I don't know how a developer can step that far backward. The developer should be able to tell that the cards played sometimes cover each other up to the degree that you can't always tell what suit is on one of the lower cards. This could be solved by spreading the cards out a little so you can see all the suits on all the cards in the trick. The developer should also be embarrassed about the display of the clubs in the bidding table, which doesn't even come that close to what a club looks like. 4 stars

I have had an early version of Bridge Baron for many years. It was good for its time. I expected that with all the years that have intervened this new version would be much better. Granted it has added a lot of bidding patterns and bells and whistles, but in the basic standard American bidding setting (with the thinking time pushed up to several seconds to "improve" play), it far too frequently makes stupid bids or plays which make absolutely no sense. 1 star

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). 2 stars