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Billed as "the board game of the future", Sophistry is like nothing so much as a more sophisticated and intellectual variant on that old favourite, Marble Madness.

It also has to be said that it is a much slower game too, the idea not being a crash bang chase around the screen, but a steady collection of keys and points, which you can trade for keys. Get enough of these and you'll be able to reach your objective, the 21st level, though what if anything you find there is anybody's guess. Yep, I'm afraid the slow gameplay and monochrome graphics meant that my interest flagged long before the hallowed twenty.

That's not to say that yours will though - it just depends upon your taste in games. The advertising blurb isn't so far off, as it does in fact bear more resemblance to something you'd play with a square of cardboard and little plastic counters than anything you'll find down the local arcade.

You play a little sort of, well... shape that bounces around the various levels like a frog on lillypads, collecting the keys as they appear, and shooting down transporters and wormholes when you want a change of scene. Plenty of the levels are perfectly straightforward, but there are also some oddities; where the lillypads disappear as you go past them, or where you have a time limit to cross the board, for instance. There are also things called seekers that you have to be avoid, and - unlike most frogs - you can't swim, so plopping in the water is definitely not to be recommended.

One of the more off-putting aspects of Sophistry is that, despite the relative simplicity of most of the gameplay, there are actually quite a lot of rules to be learnt. It is like chess in fact if you have someone to teach you who knows it well there should be no problem, but try and learn the blessed thing from the instructions, and you'll be here 'til kingdom come. Quite possibly there are a whole load of tactics waiting to be discovered that will make it a challenge for the best strategy games players amongst us, but then I was never very good at chess either...

Let's go into some of the instructions just to give you an idea of what I mean: You can exit any level by the holes indicated on the screen, and also by the direction indicated on the cross-like display at top left. However, this may change while you are playing a board. If the tracking mode is on you have to land on a target block (indicated by a ring) to release the blocks in your track before you can land on them again. There are various types of seeker, with varying degrees of dangerousness, and its type determines just when it will appear on the board, and how easy it will be to kill. Confused? You will be...

How about this quote: "If you are on a score-locked board in a scenario such as No return, RATIONS, COUNTDOWN or REPULSION and you think you may have to use UPPERS to get out of it, it is best to use them as early as possible."

*Whaaat*? It is not as if in the context of the game it gets any easier.

I'm afraid what this appears to me to be is a very simple collecting idea with a great number of extra, and not especially logical, rules added to make it more challenging and interesting. It is the complete opposite of a game like Arkanoid where the basic gameplay is very playable anyway and all the additional bits and pieces just serve to add spice. Here the original game is really too dull to make it on its own, and the added extras only serve to complicate and frustrate.

A Ford Granada will never be as good as a Jaguar, no matter how many extras you add.

Sophistry isn't a real stinker like plenty of games we see, but nor does it hold enough to make it very good. Write in and tell me I'm wrong if you like, but I don't think many of you will.