Hi KurtSchwind, thanks for your suggestions, at the moment I am not sure about the platform I am targeting. At the back of my mind I would like to develop the whole thing so that it can be played via a webpage so that I can share with the world the tweaks that I want to introduce e.g change things that frustrate me with the game. As you emphatically suggested I will now focus on figuring out the mechanics, with input just from the command line, and try to make something that works. I might use the Games::Literati module suggested above or the script that was linked above, but I might try my luck with writing the whole thing from scratch. Kind Regards Demeter