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Risk is one of those epic board games that you start, with the best of intentions, at around half past eight and end up finishing, it at all, in the early hours of the morning. Somewhere along the line, the quiet, polite people who have been your friends for years turn into jealous, sadistic, power crazy lunatics.

It says here that Risk is a classic game of strategy, quite right too. To take a look at the rule book, you'd think it was dead complicated, though it's really quite straightforward. Up to six players take part on a board which represents a map of the world with 42 countries. Each player controls an army and takes it in turn to mobilise troops, attack opponents and gain territory according to a strict set of rules, and two sets of dice.

To begin with, the players are allocated a number of armies. Each player takes it in turn to place armies on a country, hence occupying it. When all the countries are occupied the remaining armies are positioned. Player one (let's say red) must then decide who, if anyone to attack. Say there are three red armies on Brazil and two yellow ones on Argentina. Red might roll three dice to attack with three armies and Yellow would roll two to put up the maximum defence. If red scores higher on two dice than yellow, he gains the country.

So there's obviously a bit of luck involved, but strategy plays a big part too. When, who and how often to attack, when to trade in card sets for extra armies (the longer you leave it, the more you get) and when to sign a peace treaty with the person who controls Europe are all thorny problems.

Computer Risk overcomes several drawbacks of the board game, like losing the little plastic armies under the settee, and having to throw the dice being just a few.

To give it its due though, computer Risk is an excellent and comprehensive implementation of the board game. The 'board' or map is beautifully drawn and fairly faithful to the original.

There are more customisation options than your can shake a stick at. One of the more useful ones includes automatic random allocation of territories and placing of armies, which, if you had to do it manually, would take forever.

I suppose the acid test is whether playing computer Risk is any more enjoyable than the real thing. The computer is excellent at keeping track of positions, a league table of battle performance, dishing out bonus armies and remembering whose go it is. The biggest drawback though is that like Espionage you can't see the whole board at one go, but have to scroll around. That's probably not so much of a problem if you're new to the game, but I like to get a global view of the action. The one big advantage of Risk, like all computer adaptations of board games, is that you're never stuck for someone to play with.