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pleasure to keen bridge players although it has limitations. Load it and you can get excellent practice at bidding and playing hands with infinite variation. It plays near standard if a little conservation Acol-type bidding with pre-emptive jump bids, strong two and Stayman convention.

You play south except when north is declarer, so half the hands are yours to play. You are offered the hand and previous bids, and a prompt asks you to call. You can see the last trick, faintly visible on the screen. Once contract is reached you play normally, the tricks being counted for you. At the end of each trick all the hands are revealed and you can analyse the bidding and play at leisure before going on with the exercise.

Contract Bridge provides very good entertainment and my impression is that the proportion of hands with unusual distribution is above what would be expected, although that tends to add interest.

There are limitations to the program that are not obvious from the description on the box, and it is as well to be aware of them in advance. There's no scoring or provision for doubles, and each hand stands alone, so bids such as the take out double, which might be conditioned by such situations, are not supported. Nor is there a means of declaring, so you must play every hand out to the bitter end, and the absence of a slam convention makes the frequent long, strong suit hards to make the best of in bidding. More annoying was the fact that the machine plays a little too fast for me, especially when any of the hands, including declarers, is without a choice. Finally, there's a bug in the program that I was unable to trace which gives 'No room at line 6650' about once an hour, apparently at random.

These are small complaints about a good idea which will give pleasure to the many bridge-playing model B owners and the game is entertaining and useful at a reasonable price. A much more sophisticated version is apparently coming too.

Roger Carus