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Most people have heard of the battle of Alamein. But not enough have heard of what came after Rommel had been driven from the western desert in Tunisia, where the Axis forces were still capable of holding in Africa.

In a remarkable campaign between November 1942 and May 1943 British, American and French forces inflicted on the Axis its first major defeat in the west by destroying the Panzerarmee Afrika and opening the way for the invasion of Southern Europe. What makes this campaign, operation Vulcan, exciting is the constant arrival of fresh forces on both sides, producing wild swings in the balance of strength, with the Germans trying to hold onto Tunis and the Allies to break through to the coast.

R. T. Smith's game features four short scenarios (the 128K version includes a further scenario and some "What if?" variants) including the initial "race for Tunis" after the Allied landings in north Africa, in which the campaign could have been ended in a month; and most interesting of all, the battle of Kasserine Pass, the first encounter of the war between the Americans and the Germans.

If anything, his morale and fighting power ratings are over-generous to the Americans, but stopping the German drive is, on either the one-player or two-player option, difficult enough. The whole Tunisian campaign takes anything up to eight hours to play against the computer, or sixteen against a human opponent, but there is a simple save-to-tape mechanism and the actual game plays quite quickly.

The heart of the game is the order system. This allows the player to input a broad objective order to the divisions under his command, receive some information as to their strength, and then allow them to carry out the order over a long period rather than needing to issue fresh orders every move. The subordinate formations move and fight with the division, and need only be accessed if the player wishes to give them specific orders. An additional refinement on previous R. T. Smith games is the use of hidden movement, plus the use of a very simple system of providing air power for reconnaissance and ground attack - the chief value of which is to demonstrate just how poor air support was for both sides in the campaign.

Some program re-writing has also allowed for an extremely large campaign map of Tunisia to be included in the display, with perhaps a sixth of the full map visible on the screen at any one time. Manoeuvring a single tank regiment around so much empty space, unable to locate the enemy, can easily make the most aggressive table-top player very cautious indeed.

This is the best of the three wargame programs written by R. T. Smith, and probably the last for a while. Although the computer is - unlike that of Desert Rats - a worthy opponent, I find it works better as a two-player game, and should satisfy even the most critical of wargamers.