The classic board game finally makes it onto the Amiga, but something's gone wrong...

Stratego is to war what Monopoly is to Capitalism. There's no point having scruples in either, because they're both board games, and their raison d'etre is to encourage you to beat the pants off your opponent(s) in a contest that vaguely resembles some real life scenario, preferably of a deeply unpleasant nature.

Stratego manages this superbly by being based on something very unpleasant indeed - the pieces representing splendidly pompous Captains, Generals, and other murderous players of a war in the Napoleonic era. Your pieces which are varied in importance (like in chess), have limited movement capabilities (like in chess) and are similarly assembled on one side of the board, while your opponent's (let's call him Bonaparte) are on the other. It's your job to overwhelm Boney's pieces, and capture his flag.

This would be straightforward enough, except that neither of you can see how the other has positioned his most valued pieces, his dispensible pieces, and other nasties such as landmines. Each piece has a number value (the lower the number, the more powerful the piece) that remains undercover until they get into a scrap with an opposing soldier. If your General (marked an almost unbeatable One) wastes one of Boney's scouts (marked a pathetic Nine), you've destroyed one of his pieces, but hey - now he knows where your most valued player is hanging out. The trick is to sacrifice your wallies (scouts and such like) while making full use of the big cheeses (Generals and Marshalls).

Thus there are plenty of opportunities for being devious, unscrupulous, calculating, vicious, cunning and generally malicious. I like this game a great deal because it offers all these delightful possibilities without being as drawn out, complicated, intense and plain boring as something like chess. It's just a quick, harmless fix of nastiness toward your fellow man.

Unfortunately, though, there are a couple of problems with this computer game version of it. It's all been programmed perfectly respectably, with loads of little options and trinkets to keep you amused, but the most important option has proved impossible to achieve: you can't play other human beings - only the blasted computer. There's a reason for this, of course - for two people to play on one machine would demand much closing of eyes and turning of backs whenever the other person has a turn (otherwise you'd be able to see the power of his pieces as they flip up on screen) which plain wouldn't work. I've tried playing like this on a computer version of Battleships, and I can assure you that cheating soon replaces strategy as the core of the game.

That limits it to being a one player game, and unfortunately Stratego just isn't one of those games which really works as a straight puzzlers. The computer opponent is ruthless enough, but the whole thing is simply too cold for you to glean much satisfaction out of victory. I can't help feeling that the board game has just been trapped by its own design. But then Accolade should have realised this before they tried transferring it to a computer.

Stratego (as a board game) works brilliantly as a two-player game. Unfortunately, this version only lets you play the computer. And that's why it only gets...