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Shiver me timbers! Those Frenchies are at it again. Not only do they want to stop our lamb getting across the channel, they are also determined to actually win the Battle of Trafalgar - well, the computer moderated re-match of this famous battle anyway!

Squirrel Software of Manchester have come up with a neat construction of Admiral Lord Nelson's most famous encounter with the French fleet for the BBC B. You can play the computer or take on a friend in this reconstruction of the historic event.

The game begins with a screenful of sea - showing the positions of the fleets. You can manoeuvre your ships using the shift key - which creates a random movement of the opposing ships.

Some strategy comes in here. You can tell the size of each ship by the number of masts it has and some larger ships have more cannon than smaller ones. Don't stand up against a massive heavily-armed French frigate with a smaller, not so well armed ship, otherwise you could be in trouble.

Once you've sorted out the dangerous ships, you can go into battle. Choose an encounter by watching a pointer which scrolls down the side of the screen - you can stop it by using the Space bar. When you press one of the fire keys, the display changes and you'll see two ships facing each other across the waves.

Below the ships there is a useful display showing the number of cannons on each ship, the wind speed, which affects the flight of your cannon-balls and the trajectory of your cannons.

The wind speed keeps changing, so you'll have to be quite quick altering your aim to blast the enemy ships. These encounters continue until all your enemy ships have been destroyed - or your own fleet is on the bottom of the ocean!

The game doesn't make the most of the Beeb's animation capabilities, but the graphics are quite good and the exploding ships are extremely satisfying.

You have ten ships to play with, and can add to your total by capturing enemy ships. The winner is the Admiral with all his ships still seaworthy.

As I've already mentioned, the graphics don't really make use of the BBC's capabilities - but all the same Trafalgar is a good combination of arcade action and stategy which will while away some rainy Sunday afternoons quite happily. A game for the younger wargame addict.

However, I've got one major criticism. There are no printed instructions included in the packaging! With a complex game such as this, it's just not good enough to have the instructions displayed before each game starts. A big slap on the wrist, Squirrel!