Mystic Meg's Palm Reader

Here's an exciting opportunity for all those unfortunate pundits who haven't gained a penny from the lottery since Mystic Meg stopped handing out ethereal advice before the balls dropped. The sultry sage is back, and teaching the mobile world how to read their palms – despite the fact that most of us do it now by holding a phone and typing a text message.

Essentially then, this isn't really a game but a palmist's companion, and while the extent of my own palm reading experience stems as far as late night internet abuse, it does seem to be quite comprehensive.

Meg begins by taking you on a guided tour of your own clammy hand and, after a few minutes, even the most ardent sceptic comes to realise that regardless of factual worth, palm reading can be explained as a detailed and careful practice.

In many respects then, this does provides a fascinating insight into the explorative research that palmists have presumably done over hundreds of years – accounting not only for the lines on your hand, but the branches from those lines, the contours of the flesh, shape of the thumb and a host of other intricacies, which, while ultimately meaningless, can be squeezed into some sort of rationality.

Indeed, it takes a significant amount of time to accurately work through the encyclopaedic diagrams until a map of your hand has been built and deciphered. And, as Meg informs us, this amounts to a combined fortune telling, elements of which are gleaned separately from each facet of the palmist's profession.

One could almost start to be drawn down the path of believing this stuff. There appears to be a great many positive options available and while remaining typically vague and generalised, the amount of information involved does suggest some kind of calculated result that you can tally with perceptions of your own life.

But Mystic Meg's Palm Reader also subscribes to the Blackpool seafront trap of telling punters exactly what they want to hear far too often, which quickly robs the system of any fading sense of credibility.

Not once, during the many test readings entered, did Meg tell us "You're going to live a short and lonely life of abject squalor then die unloved and buried in unconsecrated ground." Surely, among the six billion people in the world, that sad fortune is destined to come true? Indeed, the social mores of western Europe suggest it will be an increasingly likely fate for those of us with a mobile phone.

And yet, somehow, no mystic ever seems to see that written in the flesh of your greying yet gold-coloured palm. Funny that!

Still, for those who subscribe to Meg's authority, there's another more useful social aspect, to Palm Reader. The game serves as a companion to help the novice soothsayer read other people's palms, and with its clear and easily understood guide driving the system, it'd make the perfect accompaniment to Gypsy Lee's crystal balls.

So if this is an area of professional carnival life you've always wished to explore further, picking up Mystic Meg's Palm Reader would probably be as useful as a dozen books.

And with a few additional fortune telling systems in place, such as determining a daily reading based on your birth date and a guide to deciphering the secrets of an empty coffee cup (a technique that's never really recovered since we adopted the use of tea bags), nothing need ever be a surprise again.

Certainly well presented and, whether something you believe in or not, well researched too, Palm Reader could then be an invaluable asset to the niche audience who've grown disenchanted with Russell Grant's chirpy old guff.