Ishido: The Way of Stones is a puzzle/board game designed by Michael Feinberg; developed by Publishing International and published by Accolade for the Atari Lynx in 1991. And it is a really good game.

The idea of the game is to fill the game board of 96 squares with 72 stones. Each stone has two attributes: colour and symbol. There are six colours and six symbols in each stone set and each comes in a pair. As you play you randomly draw a stone from a pouch and must place it on the board until either the board is complete or there are no moves left. The challenge arises from the fact that the stones must be placed adjacent to others that match, either by colour or symbol. As the board begins to fill up it becomes more and more difficult to place stones next to each other. If no possible moves are left the game will end.

Ishido offers four game types: Tournament, Challenge, Solitaire, and Cooperative, the first and last of which can be played with another player or the computer (you can even watch two computer players playing together if you like).

Scoring can be set to “Ancient” or “Modern”, and this changes the win conditions when playing. In the ‘Modern’ way the aim is to score as many points as possible. Points are awarded for matches when placing stones on the board; the higher the number of matches, the more points you earn. So 4-way matches earn the most points. Emptying the pouch also earns bonus points. In the ‘Ancient’ way the aim is to empty the pouch of all stones. If more than one player manages to empty the pouch in a Tournament game, the one with the most 4-ways wins.

Other features include: an optional move timer (turned off by default); high score tables for both Modern and Ancient games; fireworks displays, and a feature called “The Oracle”, which is an AI-controlled character that speaks to the player whenever they match a 4-way, answering questions and imparting sagely wisdom (ie. providing hints and tips).

The manual for the first version of this game (released for Macintosh) featured a fictitious story called “The Legend of Ishido“, which caused some players to believe that Ishido actually was an ancient game, recently re-discovered (which it wasn’t). It does feel like that kind of game, though, and is very absorbing and challenging to play. Ishido is one of the best puzzle games on the Lynx and has also been released on a wide variety of other systems.

More: Ishido: The Way of Stones on Wikipedia