Chaos
It was a bright summer’s day, rewarding but not uncommon hot for the walk home from school. I stopped to watch over my shoulder as one of my friends abruptly lunged off into an ungated garden: the other, not deigning to notice, walked slowly but sulkily on. Emerging again from the garden gateway with one of those sharp, red little stones from the driveway, my friend wound up his right arm like Popeye’s before, with an almighty heft, launching the pebble more or less vertically upwards, straight into the sky. We watched as, like the deus ex machina explosive Superman would send into the stratosphere in the first scene, safe in the knowledge that it would deflect a gigantic asteroid in the last, the pebble disappeared amongst the clouds with a sun-glaring blink.
Chaos is a great game. A lot of the time, when I tell you about this game or that, it is not in the sincere belief that there is any genuine mileage left to be dredged from playing it. I 
may as well recommend to you a cup of mead or a crossbow: all very good in their day, no doubt, but much superceded in ours. Chaos, though? Chaos is still playable. Chaos is still played. And not in a spirit of irony either.
Briefly then: Chaos was a game of turn-based strategy in which eight wizards were dropped into a 12 by 9 square arena with a handful of randomly selected spells. With a few exceptions (such as Gooey Blob or Magic Fire, which were immediately and cheerfully launched into the centre of the arena), most of the spells summoned up one or another from a standard bestiary of fantasy creatures, orcs and dragons and hydras and the like. If you successfully used these to kill all the other wizards before the time-limit ran out, you won the game. If not, you didn’t.
Is that it? I think so. You didn’t even need eight or, indeed, any friends to be able to play: part of the fun was naming all the computer-controlled wizards after your acquaintances and watching as that girl you fancied blew up your worst enemy with a lightning bolt before herself getting eaten by an bear, the stuck-up cow. Perhaps most intriguing of all, and certainly most indicative of the game’s peerless strategic structure, was the natural devolution of each match into the three classically distinct game stages. The peripheral 
skirmishes of the opening, with everyone desperately scrambling to avoid being killed by a magic bolt before the game had even started; the brief bloodbath of the the middlegame; and finally the fatigued, arm-heavy, rope-clinching endgame, with the Mexican stand-off of three eventually giving way to the methodical plodding-after of the weaker wizard by the stronger, the uncertain prospect of the Damoclean draw hanging dimly over the heads of all concerned.
The only real problem with Chaos was one induced by the relatively unsophisticated nature of Spectrum games. The extremely tiny technical capabilities of computers at that time contributed massively to the immediacy of the gaming experience by making it virtually impossible for the CPU and RAM to keep up with anything more than what was happening, to whom, on that screen, right now. Planning for long-term gain was therefore virtually unknown to us. The idea of being retroactively punished for previous bungling boggled! But remember that Gooey Blob/Magic Fire you unleashed at the beginning? Oh yeah. Right.
By the end of the game the fire/blob reliably occupied about 80% of the playing area, dividing the screen into two or three scarce slivers of free space in which each wizard paced around alone, watching as the scourge scarfed up his creatures like fucking Tic-Tacs, unable to do anything but wait to find out how many sole survivors would share the tie. And it was somebody’s fault! Whole new vistas of moral agency and responsibility unrolled like carpets before our eyes; metaphysical manifestos of cause and effect presented themselves; and all that we could do was sit there. And wish. That we’d been eaten. By a bear. Stuck-up cow.
Our other friend had not stopped to let us catch up, and was now a good six or seven yards ahead. We trailed behind, making up ground despite ourselves. It could not have been long, but it was long enough for us almost to have forgotten, when the pebble, presumably not far from terminal velocity, dropped with a bone-shattering PTOC! square into the centre of his bequiffed bonce. There was a long, pregnant pause as he stopped dead, anguish and astonishment battling for supremacy. He considered all his options: then, clasping his hands suddenly to his pulverized pate with a strangled squawk of incomprehension, ran off screaming.