Good Game, Charlie Brown

Accolade has entered the children’s PC game market with “Snoopy’s Game Club.” Advertised for children from 3 to 8 years old, it’s a collection of puzzles centered around a matching theme--matching pairs of pictures, matching look-alikes in a crowd and matching animated puzzle pieces.

The familiar Peanuts gang seems to attract young players. Our consultants this week (ages 5, 7 and 9) assured us that if they had this game at home, they would play it every day.

We were actually surprised at how all three children stayed so interested. The 5-year-old seemed to like finding the look-alike objects the most, while the 7-year-old would play all three puzzles endlessly. Since all the games are timed, our 9-year-old just liked beating the clock.

The matching-pairs game looks a lot like the old “Concentration” card game. You turn over screen pieces until you find matching pairs. Once they match, they bounce off the screen and a Peanuts picture is slowly revealed as the reward.

The look-alike game requires you to find matching fish, skiing Snoopys and funny-colored leaves. Start with a few pieces at a time and gradually build to higher levels of difficulty.

The hardest game is the animated puzzles. You can select an animated cartoon and break it into 4 to 64 pieces. Then you swap pictures until you put the cartoon back together. This one tended to stump even our oldest kid if the picture had too many pieces.

A really fun game for the kids, it still can be troublesome to load on your computer if you are short on RAM memory. If you have trouble, call the game company and point out this shortcoming; you won’t find any help in the manual.

Snoopy’s Game Club

Rating: ****

IBM and compatibles; 640K and hard drive required. List: $49.95.

Computer games are rated on a five-star system, from one star for poor to five for excellent.