Ishido
The Way of Stones
What is it?
The Chinese called it Shih Tao, the ancient Celts called it Runa futhark, the Mayan Indians called it Kami-a-hota, and the Japanese called it Ishido. Yet, regardless of origin, when translated the names all mean one thing, The Way of Stones.
The only thing true in the text above, which was found on the back
of the box, is that Ishido would really translate as The Way of
Stones.
The same goes for Shih Tao, though shih can mean
about a hundred different things too, depending on the intonation.
Futhark is simply the name of the Scandinavian rune alphabet, it has
whatever to do with the ancient Celts. Kami-a-hota might make some
sense in Sanskrit or Hindi, but surely not in Mayan.
Nor is Ishido some ancient traditional game. It was invented by Michael Feinberg. But all this pseudo-mysticism with which he surrounded his game makes up a good part of its appeal.
Technically speaking, Ishido is a tile matching games. There are 72 tiles in all that can have six colors and six symbols, so there are two of each. At the beginning of the game, there are six tiles on the board: one in each corner and two, diagonally opposed, in the center. They will have different colors and different symbols but are otherwise random. Now the rest of the tiles appear one after another in the tray at the top right. You try to position these tiles on the board according to the following rules:
There is no real score system. If you empty the pouch, you have one. Four-way matches are counted extra. If your main goal is to empty the pouch, the game is not all that difficult. The obvious strategy is to assign rows to symbols and columns to colors (or the other way round) and try to stick to that. Rules 1 and 3 occasionally make this difficult, but you'll empty the pouch every other time. Four-way matches are a mere matter of chance with this strategy; the best I yet got were three. Theoretically, ten are possible.
The interface is quite alright. It is annoying that even the most trivial error (clicking on an already occupied square) causes a popup that has to be clicked away, but luckily we have been spared any drag-and-drop elements Macintosh coders are sometimes wont to impose on the player (Bubbles is an especially obnoxious example). If you wish to, you can pick up the current tile with the mouse, but you don't have to, it is sufficient to just click on the square where you want it to go.
It's the visuals where the game really shines. They are lavish even by Macintosh standards. The game even comes with a special font for the menus, but you can turn that off, for nearly everything is configurable. The game ships with five stone sets:
Chung Fu is what you see in the screenshot above (it isn't all that great to play unless you're fairly familiar with Chinese characters, but it made for the smallest image file). Stone sets, board and background can be chosen seperately, and there is the option to have a solid color as background. Each stone set comes with its own victory screen and mentor, for whenever you get a message box there is a face in it. For Ramses, for example, it's the Nefertiti bust, for Wooden Shapes a hooded monk or hermit. There is an editor, but it runs only under 256 colors, and I haven't tried it yet.
The version that I have played is 1.1 c from 1990. It is what you can download now from Ian Gilman's site and other places on the web. There is a black & white version from 1989, but it is not available anywhere. So you will not be able to play Ishido on a compact Mac, or on a 12" monitor, since only the black & white version was playable under the lower resolution. The game will start at 512×384, but vital parts of the screen will be cut off.
Apart from this restriction, Ishido will run on any color Mac at all. I played it on my Performa 6400, Performa 630, and Macintosh IIcx with nearly equal enjoyment. Nearly, because it is nicer on a display set to 640×480, where it will run in fullscreen, without a permanent menu bar even. You get that by clicking near the top. On a larger display, it will run in a standard window. On the IIcx changing the appearance was a bit slow, but the gameplay itself was not affected.
Ishido does not require you to set your display to 256 colors. There are no problems with more colors, but it should not be played with less, unless you create some custom graphics first. The ones that come with the game look ugly at 16 colors and are unplayable in black & white.
Ishido was re-released without any changes in 1994 as one of the first MacPlay games.
The PC version from 1990 supported about any graphics adapter existing at the time. Hercules and CGA both use the same monochrome 640×200 graphics (Ishido is one of the few games that used the monochrome hi-res CGA mode). This looks surprisingly good under Hercules, the tiles are square, only the letters look a bit squished. There are two boards and seven tilesets to choose from.
EGA and MCGA are lo-res; at first this astonished me a bit, but I guess since no other system had 640×350 graphics, but many 320×200, it made sense. There are eight tilesets/boards to choose from, essentially simplified from the Amiga graphics:
VGA graphics are simplified from the original color Macintosh. They don't look all that good, and there are fewer tilesets and boards to choose from. Unfortunately there was no SVGA support.
Interface is the same for them all. You can play with or without a mouse. Without a mouse, you move the cursor with the arrow keys and place tiles with the space bar. The menu is accessed with Esc and navigated with the arrow keys. With the mouse it's pretty much the same as on the Mac, except that the menu is accessed with a right click.
The PC version is not unproblematic. It runs well on a 286, and I found I can play it without problems on a Sempron 2200+ running XP, but it freezes for a few seconds after placing a stone on a Pentium running 98, practically making it unplayable.
| Ashido |  |
90 |  |
Kemal Ezcan | ||||
| Huang Shi | |
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| Drops | |
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Motelsoft | |||||
| Soko | |
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Motelsoft | |||||
| Shogatsu |  |
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Alan Meiss | |||||
| Shih Tao |  |
91 | |
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| Ishido for X11 |  |
92 | |
John Sullivan | ||||
| Ishido for Windows | |
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Douglas Mayfield | |||||
| Shih Dao | |
93 | |
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| Stones | |
94 | |
Motelsoft | ||||
| Tile: The Revenge |  |
95 | |
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| Passage Plus | |
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| Nanjing | |
96 | |
Dirk Hagedorn | ||||
| Flowers Ishido | |
 |
Luciano Vernaschi | |||||
| TOAG | |
98 | |
Evan Schwartz | ||||
| Ishido by Arkos |  |
05 |  |
The official ports:
A few of the inofficial ports and recreations:
