Ishido – The Way of Stones is a puzzle game in which the player's job is to match stones of various colors and patterns to adjacent stones of corresponding colors and patterns. Each stone has two distinguishing features: a symbol and a color of either the symbol or the background. You must empty your pouch of 72 randomly sequenced stones onto the board, which is comprised of 96 squares.

To score points in this game, you must create one-way, two-way, three-way, and four-way matches. Matches can be made up, down, to the left, and to the right, but not diagonally. When you create a four-way, which is done by matching your stone using one of its attributes for two of the stones, and its other attribute for the other two stones, you will earn double the points awarded for subsequent matches of any kind.

If you need help playing the game, you can go to the Help Menu and push key to show you the remaining tiles in the pouch, and you can push key to show you the possible legal moves you can make with your current stone. However, these cheats disqualify you from having the high score.

Ishido – The Way of the Stones is over when you have used all of your stones or when there are no more legal moves.

Ishido- The Way of Stones is a solitaire board game played with tiles (like Shanghai). The objective is to place all of the tiles onto the board and obtain the highest possible score by following specific rules of play. It is a solitaire game. There are ways to play that can dramatically increase the score, which makes the game very strategic in nature. Additionally, when desired, the player can get an oracle reading by asking a question…the question is answered when the player makes a very elegant play (4 way match).