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Patience players bored with dealing the cards will be interested in this game. You should be warned, however, that no cheating is allowed. The trade-off is that the machine will not allow such mistakes as placing red on red.

You must sort the cards into four suits after putting them red on black in the old familiar fashion. Each suit must be in ascending order from ace to king. The computer merely frees you from moving the cards about.

You are first asked if you want to see the instructions.

Once the main program is loaded and the random number generator has done its stuff and 'shuffled' the cards, you are shown the starting point; seven columns of cards, ranging from one to seven cards in each column. All the cards are face downwards, except the last. The remaining cards are placed face down in an area at the bottom of the screen, labelled 'deal'.

It is not very likely that you will be able to place a card on the 'suits' area immediately, so you must try and improve the situation by laying the cards in descending order on the columns, until the card you need for purposes of building up the suits is exposed.

It is easy to control the action. The commands are shown on the screen in abbreviations, and they work like this: 'M' moves a card to the chosen column, provided this is a legitimate move. 'P' plays a dealt card onto the designated column. 'D' deals a new card. 'S' transfers the card which you have successfully revealed into the 'suits' area. 'C' cancles the game you are playing, and gives you the chance to start again.

The game is faster than the card game it copies. Should you decide to transfer a run of cards from one column to another, it's done instantly. Any following card is also turned over automatically.

The game has been carefully thought out. Within the restraints of the amount of information shown the screen displays are well designed. Colour has been put to good use, and a very limited but appropriate amount of sound has been added. But I can't help wondering who would want to play Patience on a micro.