It's hip to be square in this simple but satisfying game from Richard Garrad's cubist period

Do your fingers cry out for mercy as you try 'just once more' to reach the 120th screen of Revenge of the Mutant Bananas from Somewhere North or Penge? Are you inevitably slain or eaten by trolls and dragons when you set forth to seek the Golden Carbuncle? Why not take time off to relax with The Grid, a simple game for the 16/48K Spectrum.

The idea is very straightforward. The computer takes a square grid comprising four to seven bands of colour, scrambles the bands and leaves you to sort out the resulting mess into its original state - a little like the dreaded cube or Spillikins but in two dimensions.

To begin, just enter the grid size you wish to play on and then the level of difficulty (0 is easy, 9 is hard). There is a pause as the grid is rearranged, after which it is displayed. You are then asked to input your move.

As you move each row or column, it wraps around the grid.

The two machine code routines at addresses 32001 and 32031 allow the variables to be saved and loaded as DATA Z$ () and are relocatable. To use these routines in your own programs you must have, as your first line:

1 LET Z$="": rest of program...

The routines can then be called using a subroutine similar to that at line 1000 onwards.