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Islandia is an almost excellent (if somewhat overpriced) game, unfortunately marred by some flaws in the program which I hope the company will swiftly correct.

The program achieves what is almost impossible on the BBC Micro due to its memory limitations - a decent strategy game which utilises a high resolution (Mode 1) graphical display.

After loading, one is given the option of colour or monochrome display and then a random set of islands is generated on the screen (you can request a new screen if you don't like it).

The game is played by between two and four players who each control a shipping company. Each turn consists of an economic phase and two movement and combat phases. One may purchase one of four types of ship - steamships, battleships, explorer and troop ships - and a number of armies. The idea is to conquer islands by transporting armies to them. Explorers discover the wealth of the island while the other warships can attack those of other companies or defend one's own territory.

In the movement and combat phase players move each of their ships in turn by appropriate key presses. Extra interest is added by the fact that ships other than steamships cannot sail directly against the wind.

The strategic complexity of the game is genuinely demanding, indeed better than some games I have seen that do not concede 20K to the graphics screen. Documentation is excellent - a detailed and properly printed booklet. So what are the problems?

The first two are probably unavoidable: the ships are displayed as single user-defined characters, no problem on my high-res colour monitor, but on a TV set it's hard to tell one type from another. The save fame facility is extremely slow since the 20K screen must be *SAVEd and reloaded.

However, on reloading, the program asks "How many turns?" which is one of the original game options that should have been saved. Worse, on one occasion a reloaded game crashed with a "no such variable" error.

This is not the only bug I have found: sometimes a troopship is not allowed to move away from a port and occasionally random debris is left on screen. In one game this was deposited just outside one player's home port, blocking access for his ships and ruining the game. The inmput handling is also unfriendly: for example, an accidental Return press by one player to a final question can skip the first option for the next player.

Despite these problems the game is currently in strong demand for use by my family and has a rare originality to it. However, I do think that releasing software with the sort of bugs I have described is unforgiveable since they are readily discovered in a few hours of play.

Jonathan Evans