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Brian Clough's Football Fortunes have been varied to say the least this season. He's out of the cup competition and desperately trying to hang on to the title challengers. After the kind of start he had to the season, that's disappointing. Will be go elsewhere? Will he be sacked? Will he stay for one more year? Well, I haven't got a clue, but I do know that any football game I play has got to throw up these kind of uncertainties if it is to have any sense of what the game is all about at management level. This package sets out to do just that.

Brian Clough's Football Fortunes is not simply a piece of software you load up and play. There's a board, cards and counters as well. The aim, simply, is to win as many honours as possible and accrue more management points than anybody else. The software interacts with the board game which works along Monopoly lines, but don't go thinking that all it does is roll the dice for you as a gimmick, it is an active and constant element.

Between two and five players can sit down and play this, but a season will last a good hour so don't plan on going out otherwise you'll be pretty unpopular with the other players. I said two could play but Brian Clough's Football Fortunes is a game that improves with more players. The really fun aspect is the underhand wheeling and dealing that goes on with rival factions. You just can't get that with two people.

Once the game has loaded, you type all the players' names in and from then on everything must be undertaken in that order, otherwise the program will get out of sync. Select yourself a team, a real or imaginary one. In my game the women were forced to play as Girlie Utd - very funny we thought, tee hee.

The computer then allots you a set of players based on skill ratings in a set formation. Skill ratings number between one and five and the formation is broken down into keepers, defenders, forwards and utility players who may play anywhere. A five star utility player carries a lot of transfer value and as the game progresses you'll find huge transfer records being set for players of this quality. All the players have contemporary names so you can fill your side with your favourite players. There's even some blank cards so you can write in the names of more obscure players - like Bryan Robson.

Once you are set up, the team is divided up into attack and defence and the star ratings of players in these sections added up, ready to be input into the computer before each match.

The game now reverts to the board, and this is where the Monopoly style play comes in as you move counters around, landing on different squares. At the beginning of the season you're allotted some nice toytown money to splash around, but you will not be spending it all on players. Many of the squares you land on involve expenses.

Each turn you'll come to dread landing on the Wages, Selection Problems and Crisis squares. On the plus side though, there is sponsorship, bank finance and auction squares, some of which are half price if you land on them. Other players will try and force you to pay as much as possible for the privilege of buying no marks like Eric Gates in this situation.

Manager's Luck acts as a chance card and may be good - horribly good in one case when one of my opponents floated his team on the stock exchange for a quarter of a million; or horribly bad as the manager of Reading woke up one morning to find his side decimated by a car crash. Reading slipped from top to bottom within the space of half-a-dozen games. Football's a funny old game. Downright hilarious sometimes, though I thought a helpful suggestion for a luck readout "A plane crashes whilst carrying a team of your choice", was perhaps in poor taste.

After everyone has had their move you play a game, inputting the attack and defence statistics into the computer. Current form is taken into account with strength and, I assume, a certain random factor from some of the results. Final scores are printed out vidiprinter-style and gate money is paid out for attendances. It is possible to go bankrupt so any money coming in is of benefit. Apart from the league fixtures you will find yourself playing in the FA Cup and in the second and successive seasons, Europe. Imagine our horror then to have to watch Girlies Utd take the league title and win the FA and EUFA Cups in their second seasons. Well, we let 'em win...

Brian Clough's Football Fortunes is great fun for any enthusiast of the game. We actually chose to carry on playing this rather than watch a live game on the box, that's how absorbing it gets. There are faults but none of them serious. It is possible to get so much money, for example, that you can buy every good player on the market and thus assemble a team of unassailable strength, which is not as any Man Utd supporter will tell you the case. There are also a few minor omissions in the rules but you can iron those out for yourselves.

Whether or not you could accurately describe this as a computer game is debatable but who cares? Last issue I put out a plea for a good football game and now I've got one. In fact, we got a result!