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An original strategy game on the BBC Micro? It would be easier to buy a second processor from Acorn. But at £7.95, Time-Lords from the cheekily named Red Shift claims to be just that.

Time-Lords is played on five planets throughout their history of fifteen time zones. There are five races, mostly from Doctor Who not Alan Garner, each starting life on either Skaro, Mondas, Vortis, Neston or Stoke Newington.

You can have up to five players, all being Time-Lords hired to meddle with history and wars for the benefit of their race. The objective of the game is not clear but you could guess that you're supposed to help your race win.

> Time-Lords is a neatly labelled cassette with a bondage illustration for a cover. The instructions are printed upside-down and written in an English-like language. You get the impression that the game is hard but little else... a simple and effective way to ruin Time-Lords.

This could have been a great game. You and your rivals are playing on a board that behaves like a spreadsheet. Meddle with a war and history changes.

Declining civilisations, civil war, time traps, time beacons and a host of other complexities offer a great potential.

> But the program kills the game stone dead. The first problem is that the other players aren't supposed to see what you're doing. It prompts for people to be sent in and out of the room as necessary. It's so bad, it even works when there's only one player playing.

The program is lazy. It's not error protected, it's not consistent and it's very slow. The board, in one of the graphics modes, is tediously redrawn at each step before reverting back to the teletext screen.

The hieroglyphics that make up the playing pieces aren't clear on a TV or in the instructions. No one who bravely joined in was quite sure what they were doing.

> Time-Lords is a bored game. In theory, I suspect it could be tremendous fun... it's a fabulous idea. But Red Shift should nip back to Time Zone 1 and have a meddle with the program and documentation.

If you don't mind working quite hard to play a game, you might enjoy Time-Lords. Otherwise, the five player, five dimensional board game falls flat on its face.