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In Japan, the national Chess variant is known as
Shogi, The General’s Game. Played on
a 9x9 board, each player begins with 20 pieces.As in other Chess varieties, the goal is to checkmate the king. Shogi is not as widely known or
played as the other famous Japanese strategy game, Go, but it has millions of
adherents and large tournaments receive significant coverage in newspapers and
television.
There are two features of Shogi that make it significantly different from Chess. First, in Chess, a pawn promotes upon
reaching the back rank. In Shogi,
any piece promotes if it makes a move within the last three rows of enemy
territory. Each piece has a specific
other piece to which it promotes.
The most striking difference between Chess and Shogi, however, is certainly the
move known as the drop. In Shogi,
when an enemy piece is captured, it may be used by the other player. Instead of making a normal move, a
player may take a captured piece and place it anywhere he wishes on the board. For this reason, Shogi pieces are not
different colors, because they would change possession. Instead, Shogi is played with tiles.
One side of each tile shows the unpromoted piece. The other side shows the
promoted version. One end is pointed to show the forward direction. Ownership is shown by
pointing the piece toward the enemy.
New players sometimes expect that the existence of the dropped piece might make
for a wild, free flowing game, with pieces appearing out of nowhere to launch
attacks all over the board. If
anything, the opposite tends to be true.Since a piece can appear from anywhere, the king is never safe.He must retain a strong guard to
prevent the dropped attacks.
Meanwhile, since pieces reappear on the board continuously, a Shogi game rarely
ends in a traditional Chess endgame, with very few pieces on the board.This makes for somewhat closed games.
For the Chess Variant tournament, the club will provide Westernized Shogi sets,
with symbols that show similar Western Chess pieces, and have the movement of
the piece depicted on the piece itself.
More information (If there is a resource for Shogi you would like to
see listed here, email dave@gamesinmichigan.com.)
Wikipedia :Shogi
Chessvariants.org :Shogi
Play Online (human opponents): Chessvariants.org offers turn based play.
I am not aware of a server that offers "live" Shogi play.
Computer Play -Shogi is supported by the .Zillions of Games
program. A "mini" version is supported in the free demo. The full game
is supported in the full (paid) version.