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Alright, put away the striped vest, the swag bag and the brick. This is serious robbery, robbery with intent to steal a million quid.

They Stole A Million gives you five increasingly lucrative and difficult places to rob, starting with a smalltime coin dealers' and eventually finishing with the Narburak Museum in Cairo - large scale lucre here. Since setting up the heist (we'll be using underworld jargon from now on) costs money, sorry, sponduliks, you start with £55,000 but you'll need to succeed in each job in order to fund the next and bigger one.

The first stage involves choosing a target, picking the team, acquiring information about the place you're robbing and finally, getting a fence to dispose of the goods. Now all this costs money and your initial £55,000 doesn't go far.

A blueprint and general information on your target is free. But you'll need more info, and there's plenty to be had for a price: like details of security and alarm systems, and what loot is to be had. It's well worth buying.

But don't get carried away, better choose your team. Case-histories on eighteen villains are provided. Each has a first and second speciality, and each will demand a fee plus a percentage of the blag. So Dynamite d'Arcy blows safes but he also drives. He's not as fast as Adam Prost, who's a muscle-man too.

Choose up to four villains and the appropriate fence and you're off to the next stage. The computer keeps tabs on your spending and won't let you exceed the limit.

That was the easy bit. Now you're planning the job, using the blueprint which appears on screen. Each villain has to be co-ordinated step by step, by selecting the action icons available for that particular villain: move in any direction, pick locks, open doors, blow things up, smash them, disable alarms and pick up loot. The seconds tick away (though not in real-time) as you proceed.

Trouble is, you can only plan the moves for one villain at a time, so you must watch the seconds elapsed carefully at each stage to make sure there are no potential holdups and that members of the team won't get in each other's way. Trying to get d'Arcy into a room before Charlie Volts has disabled the alarm gets you no points.

Once you've laid down a 'track' for each villain, you can rewind, fast-forward and edit bits in and out. Only when you're reasonable sure that all the tracks will work together do you 'run' the robbery.

As the Boss, you've given yourself the cushy job of lookout and you can intervene if things go wrong. So you 'freeze' the action if the old Bill cruise past, home in to see what each member is doing inside the building and make a run for it if things go drastically wrong - and they probably will.

Astute as you all are, you'll know that They Stole A Million isn't as easy as I've made it sound. It's very difficult, it'll involve you scribbling on the backs of envelopes, frantically unscrambling 'tracks' that make members of the team foul up each other's work. You'll look more like the Lavender Hill Mob than the gang who did The Italian Job.

They Stole A Million is a clever and well-designed program. The whole thing is icon- and menu-driven so it's easy to get the hand of playing information is attractively presented on pop-up windows. Also to its credit is a catchy little tune.

On the bad side are the graphics in the blueprint and robbery stages which are rather barren. A little more detail would have been welcome. Also, since you'll have to read quite a lot of text in the first stage, the programmers might have made the descriptions of targets and villains a little funnier. I only got one chortle out of the whole lot.

I enjoyed They Stole A Million because it's original and involves using your loaf a little. It's reasonable too. You don't have to start all over again if the robbery goes wrong, you simply go back to the blueprint and edit the tracks. It's enough to make Ronnie Biggs come out of retirement.