I have to admit, my very first knowledge of this tarot program was because I see it advertised on eBay (www.ebay.com) all the time.  The program is normally inexpensive (avg. retail $19.99) but I see it sell for less than half that more often than not.  This may be due to the fact that this program is older than many others on the market, having been produced in 1996.

One of the benefits of this program is that it is available in both PC or Mac formats.  It can work with all Windows versions 3.1 or higher.  I am running a PC with Win95 so my review is based on those features.  Anyone with a Mac who would be willing to review the Mac features for me, please email Wicce.

Installation was a breeze.  Even I wasn't intimidated by it.  The program ran cleanly right from the start and the only trouble I had at all with it was that it did not automatically set up a shortcut on the desktop so that when I went to run it at a later date I couldn't find it on the hard drive and had to run it from the CD-Rom each time.  This also means whenever you want to restart it you need to do this.  Many people, like myself, will find this a pain in the butt and will want to/need to install a desktop shortcut manually. I do not think you need to have the cd-rom in the drive to run the program.

The initial presentation when you start up this program is minimal.  Essentially it loads a screen with a nice picture of cards against a cloudy gray sky and the title.  You have to choose "returning user" or "new user."  Each time you use the program it allows you to save the reading under the user's name.  You make this choice and then you are shown a screen which has a blank layout, whichever layout was last used by that user is left as a default and is the first one that comes up the next time.  The different positions of the layout are blank, waiting for you to deal the cards.  In other words, I didn't see any fancy graphical movies or anything which would require a lot of time to load or anything.  Packaging is also nice but not overly artistic.

When I loaded the program, I saw a choice of 4 different tarot spreads to choose from; you can also create your own spread in the program and save it as one of your choices.  I did not try to load a spread of my own, but it looks as though you could load more than one.  One thing that is nice is that you can access the different meanings of each position in the spreads, before you deal any cards into them.  When you create your own spread, you can input your own meanings for each position, and you can get pretty detailed with them.

This program offers two tarot decks for your use in readings.  One is the standard Rider-Waite deal.  The other is a brilliant, new original design deck made exclusively for this program.  It features modern graphics which are intuitively right on the mark for the meaning of the card and often wildly untraditional in their imagery.  Elemental correspondences are often really apparent with the new deck.  Whenever I use this program, I do choose the original design deck over the Rider-Waite.  It is just a really great design!  I'm regretful that it has never been produced as a hard copy deck.  I'd buy it!

You can also import decks of your own into the program.  This is an advanced user feature and not something I would recommend doing until you were used to playing with the program; however, this makes a nice feature for people who have "unusual" favorite decks.  Another nice thing is that if you have designed an original tarot deck of your own, you could import your graphics into this program and do readings with your own deck.

You can print out different things involved in this program.  For example, you can print out your actual reading, but you can also print reports like what trends are coming up for you over the course of several readings.  You can have this program search for and tell you those trends in each reading.  You can print out meanings of the cards specifically.  There is also an option to print the "playfield," which I think is the blank spread.  Sort of for marking your own layouts later on, I guess.

The meanings in this program are thoughtfully written out and are definitely altered by the position in which they land.  In other words, a 9 of Cups has a different meaning come up depending on what spread you use, and what position it lands in.  You can add your own comments into the meanings of the cards too, so that you have quite a lot of customizability with this program.  Especially in terms of the original deck, the meanings are better than your average cheap book on tarot.  You can also select whether you want the meanings to be more "descriptive" or "statistical."

This program runs fast enough because it does not use a lot of graphics.  Other than the tarot cards themselves, there is little art involved.  The dialog box that opens up to run the program is not full screen and looks like crap when you maximize it to full screen.  There seemed to be a slight bug in that the buttons which show at the bottom of the layout are partially covered by the bottom of the window itself.  It looks as though all you need to do is slightly increase the size of the window; however, no matter how much you do this, the buttons remain halfway hidden under this bottom window border.  After being annoyed by it for fifteen minutes, I gave up trying to accomodate this.  It does this with all the spreads that it comes loaded with.

My impression of this program, overall, is that it is a nice solid tarot program with only a couple of minor annoyances.  If you are looking for a really pretty interactive experience, this is probably not the software for you.  It says a beginner or an experienced user can use, however I would recommend this more for an experienced reader.  Do I recommend? Yes!

Best Feature: Cyber Tarot original design deck

Most Lacking Feature: graphical presentation

System Requirements:
PC
Microsoft Windows 3.1 or Windows 95
33 MHz 486DX
8 MB RAM
Double-speed CD-ROM drive

or

Macintosh
System 7.1 or later
68030 processor
5 MB RAM (2 MB free)
Double-speed CD-ROM drive

Click here to return
 
or here to purchase this program
 
also see
Cyber Tarot Online!

Review Copyright 2000 by Gina M. Pace

Cyber Tarot CD-Rom, 1996
Douglas Rushkopf, Multimedia 2000
ISBN: 1-57948-001-2