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Superpower is far from the action packed arcade game suggested by the front page of the cassette insert. It is a slow-moving board game for two players. The game, a sort of 20th century chess, involves some skill and strategy. However, the two players have to be human; there is no option for the single player to play the computer.

Few instructions appear on the cassette insert, apart from the fact that LOAD " " CODE is the command required to load the program. Despite the load bytes command, the game appears to be written entirely in BASIC.

Several pages of instructions are available on the screen once the program has loaded. Fortunately, these are available at any stage through a help option, as the game is quite complex for beginners.

The game itself occupies a board containing plain squares. Each square represents one country. Each country starts with an equal number of resources; money, people, weapons, etc, and each player receives an equal number of countries. The players take it in turn to make decisions over the allocation of resources and the military within the countries under their control.

The aim is to invade and take over countries occupied by your opponent. The winner is the one who- takes' over the entire world. This can take quite some time, so a save game option is available.

This is a novel board game for those who like that kind of thing, but poor graphics, and no one-player option would limit its appeal.

D.N.