Ishido The Way of Stones

Ishido The Way of Stones is a puzzle video game released in 1990 by Accolade and developed by Publishing International. It was designed by Michael Feinberg and programmed by Ian Gilman and Michael Sandige. The game’s producer was Brad Fregger, and Brodie Lockard (the designer of the Shanghai computer game) contributed with graphics.

Gameplay – Ishido The Way of Stones

Ishido The Way of Stones is a puzzle board game consisting of a set of 72 stones and a game board of 96 squares.

Every stone has two attributes: a color and a symbol. There are six colors and six symbols in each stone set, thus creating 36 unique stones. Since each stone comes in a pair, there are therefore 72 stones in each stone set.

The primary objective of Ishido The Way of Stones is to place all 72 stones onto the board of 96 squares. The challenge arises because stones must be placed adjacent to others that they match, either by color or symbol. When the board begins to fill up, this objective is not so easily accomplished.

A valuable move is the 4-way, in which a stone is placed in the midst of four others, two of which are matched by color, and two which are matched by symbol.

Ishido comes with six differently themed stone sets, five different game boards, and a variety of Oriental chimes and sound effects.

Release history – Ishido The Way of Stones

After Epyx failed to publish it for Christmas ’89,^[2] the original Ishido The Way of Stones game was published by Publishing International in a limited edition in a hand-made walnut slip box with disks for Mac and Mac II.^[3] The limited edition retailed for $495. Then the following year, 1990, Accolade published the first mass-market version for the Macintosh,^[4] with ports to DOS, Amiga, Game Boy, and Sega Genesis in the same year. The Atari Lynx and Famicom Disk System versions were published in 1991. The Microsoft Entertainment Pack contains an adaptation of Ishido called Stones.

The Genesis port of the game was involved in the copyright trial, Sega v. Accolade. Ishido The Way of Stones A physical board game version of Ishido was published in Japan by ASCII in 1992.

Ishido: Track 1

Ishido: Track 2

Ishido: Track 3

Ishido: Track 4

Ishido: Track 5

Ishido: Track 6