Should you ever feel the urge to gamble away your life savings, you now have the alternative of staying at home and playing Minerva's Casino, as long as you don't feel losing all your money is a statutory requirement. Choose from Blackjack, Roulette, Fruit Machine or Backgammon.

You start with two pounds, but I have been able to amass about thirty thousand in a day. Apart from being unrealistic, this raises an interesting psychological and moral question. Will children, in particular, be encouraged by this simulated reinforcement into a taste for real gambling? It is already well established that a serious compulsive gambling problem is affecting a number of teenagers in this country.

From a technical point of view, Casino is very interesting because the games are supplied as a series of correctly written RISC OS tasks, which sit on the menu bar when loaded. They are not very big, so a machine with standard memory can easily have them all in and keep room for more serious tasks as well. However, one common program - the Banker - must always be present and copy protection has been limited to this. Hence, the games may be transferred to hard disc for convenience, although you will be prompted to insert the original disc on loading the first game.

To play any of the games, one or more players must establish an identity in the banker from whose window you drag your bets, which can be of any amount, onto the roulette table, the backgammon board or wherever else you fancy, before spinning the wheel and collecting (or not) your ill-gotten gains. One irritating point is that you cannot type in the amount you wish to bet, you must select it using up/down arrows. This means that, with larger bets permitted by the unrealistic odds of winning, you must leave the mouse for half an hour with a heavy object resting on the Select button!

One of the easiest ways to win money is on the fruit machine. You can bet any amount in multiples of 10p (assuming you have it), so what you do is bet the minimum amount until you get a dead cert (e.g. two cherries) which you are allowed, at random, to hold. Bet all your money with the appropriate signs held, and you could win up to 20 times what you started with. This eventually makes winning so easy that it becomes tedious.

The other games including Blackjack (21, Pontoon, Vingt-et-un or whatever you like to call it) are mostly somewhat limited implementations of standard gambling games. For example, Roulette allows only a limited subset of the standard bets to be placed. Perhaps the most disappointing is Backgammon which is available only for two players to compete against each other, and has no computer strategy supplied. Again, the rules are not fully implemented, with doubling of stakes, for example, not allowed.

Overall, I welcome the design of games as RISC OS "toys" that can be added to the Desktop environment and hope that other companies follow the lead. There is, however, a disappointing absence of sound throughout. I am also unhappy with the rather sloppy aspect of the programming that has allowed unrealistic winning odds and only partial implementation of the game rules. I am not sure that these games will prove to have long term playability.