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This delightful program is similar to the famous Waddington game of Monopoly (a picture of a Monopoly-type board appears on the box) but has some interesting refinements.

Up to nine players can participate and the object is to drive the opposition into bankruptcy. Each in turn moves round a 'board' - on the screen this is represented as a car with the player's name on it cruising past various buildings while a jolly jingle emerges from the loudspeaker. What happens next depends on which building you come to halt in front of...

Each player starts with £15,000 cash and, as in Monopoly, the art of survival depends on steering a fine course between maintaining enough cash to pay your debts and buying enough property to ensure an adequate income. If you stop in front of a hotel or store, you can buy it (if it's for sale and you have the cash available). If it's already yours you can sell it or improve it (which increases its rental value). Of course if someone owns it you have to pay out rent.

Sometimes you land on Chance, when more or less anything can happen: jail (which you can buy your way out of) or, more agreeably, Salary, which gives you a cash sum based loosely on the amount of property you own. There are also banks which will sometimes lend you money, depending on your assets.

Another feature is the Market, where you can buy and sell commodities in the form of shares, land and gold. The price of these varies considerably during the game and there are real killings to be made, as well as shirts to be lost.

At the end of a turn, each player's personal balance sheet of cash and other assets is shown. Light-fingered Monopoly players in the habit of snitching a few hundred quid from the bank when no one's looking will get no joy from this all-electronic version!

I tested the game en famille one Sunday and it lasted for several hours. It is a measure of the careful thought which has gone into it that, though one can dispense with the graphics and sound, no one grew tired of them. The participants were: yours truly, a left-wing sister (who took to this most capitalist of games with alarming enthusiasm), a plutocratic brother to the right of Genghis Khan, and a disobedient but decorative dalmatian puppy called Pimms, whose main talent is her ability to recognise the rustle of a packet of crisps at several hundred yards - and to take appropriate action. We jointly took the decision for Pimms during her absences on crisp-hunting forays...

The first two hours produced little of incident, but were totally absorbing. My left-wing sister concentrated steadily on acquiring property (despite her claim that all property is theft) while the capitalist brother, after an initial disastrous attempt to corner the gold market and ruin another player (something the program doesn't cater for) also prospered. Alas! I began to find it cheaper to sit in jail and collect my rents than to move around the board. It became clear that the more property you own, the more revenue you receive, but the more lolly you have to fork out for things like gas, electricity and telephone.

If you're faced with a bill you don't have the cash to pay, a debt collector steps in and forcibly sells some of your assets, first deducting his own 15 per cent of course.

My sister became incensed when she received a Chance message saying "Ex-wife sues, pay £2,500". "Typical sexist nonsense," was her comment. Meanwhile, my brother was more annoyed that you can't buy a bank in this game as he had some 'interesting' economic theories he wishes to try out on his fellow players. His other complaint was that the car you drive around in looks more like my own battered Renault 5 than the Mercedes he felt he deserved.

I have three main criticisms of the program. First of all, it needs a printed rulebook. The rules are on the tape, so you can't refer to them during a game. Next, there should be a facility to save a game to return to it later: most adventure games allow this.

Finally, when a game ends you should have the chance to start again without having to reload the program (a lengthy process).

These comments apart, this is one of the more impressive games I have seen for the Beeb; it should appeal to families who enjoy playing games together and who would like to sit around a computer or introduce someone else to the joys of a computer.

The outcome of our game? Pimms won, of course. It's a dog's life.