Shiara - A Boardgame from Atlantis for Three People
by David "Inky" Scott

I've always loved abstract strategy games. I've never found myself in possession of the luck needed for a lot of boardgames. The dice do not love me. That's not to say I don't like regular games, I do. But there are times when I like a game of pure skill. That's why I prefer to play chess, Icehouse, go, Nine-Men's-Morris, and other games like that.

And so it was, way back at Coahoma High School a teacher assigned the junior class I was in the project of making our own games (classes at CHS were always interesting as the primary focus was on practical applications of what we learned, not just rote). I don't remember who it was though, it's been so long. It was an exercise not just in writing but also design. We had to write the rulebook, make it nice and clear, and submit a prototype of the board or whatever game components were to be used.

I thought of what would be a perfect game for me. Two problems always came up when playing games in high school. The first was time. Lunch was short. Study times were shorter. There wasn't a lot of time for setting up Monopoly or even a quick D&D session. I wanted a game that played fast and was quickly set up and put away. The second problem was that out of all the "quick" games out there at the time, there were very few suitable for exactly three players, and I had two friends that I liked to play games with.

So, I created Shiara. Three players, a quick setup and breakdown, and no luck necessary. There was also a fairly cool backstory about the game being really from Atlantis and that it was all tied up in symbols and spirituality. I have completely forgotten that bit, but it may be tucked away somewhere in all my old stuff.

Anyway, the rules are simple.

You will need:

• A copy of the board (found below)
• Three players
• Four pawns for each player

Each player, in turn, may do one or both of the following:

• Place one of his unplayed pawns in his starting point, if it is empty
• Move a pawn to a neighboring space

Order doesn't matter. You may play first or move first, depending on what's available to you and what you wish to do.

If a pawn moves to a space occupied by another pawn, that pawn is pushed into another space of the moving player's choice. If the pawn to be pushed has no empty spaces into which to move, it is removed from the board.

If a player begins his turn with one of his pawns occupying the center space, called the "Throne," he may remove any one pawn from the board. If he does this, however, he may do nothing else his turn.

Pawns removed from the board are treated as unplayed and may be returned to play normally.

Victory occurs when a player occupies all four spaces of any one color.

Lagniappe. As an added bonus I present the original layout of the board as drawn in Paintworks Plus for the Apple IIgs way back in '91 and saved in...Apple Preferred Format. Oh gods I feel old. It's been saved, since my high school days, on an old beat-up 85 meg Q-Drive that still works like a charm. In fact, it was finding this old pic that inspired me to redraw the board with nicer graphics. The few times that I'd gotten people here at the shop to play it, we played on a paper copy that I'd hand-drawn about a year back.

Yes, the symbols are from the "Wingdings" font. Unfortunately, as Pointless (a utility to allow the Apple IIgs to use TrueType fonts) hadn't come out yet there was no way to anti-alias them, so they're nice and jaggedy. You can see that even back then I was leaning for the "ocean" color scheme. However, I couldn't get too fancy as Paintworks Plus only allowed sixteen colors in a single graphic, to say nothing of being limited to 320 by 200 pixels.