April '84
The objective of the game is for each player to be the first to get all of their four men to the central 'home' area. Players position 'walls' to direct their players home or to block their opponents and can send a man back to the start by running over him.
This was the winning entry of The Saturday Show 'Design a Game' competition. For the last 20+ years we thought this was in October ’83, but actually the letter from Commodore is dated '21 April 1983', which means it must have been around March '83. We were thinking this might be a mistake, however, we also found a letter from Acornsoft confirming we'd sent them a new version (this version will have been renamed to Gambit as they requested) and this is dated 30 September '83.
This was written entirely in BASIC and relying heavily on the very slow built-in line draw function.