Introduction
Shogi is a very fascinating board game which I’ve recently taken interest in and is what will be discussed about in this post. This board game is also commonly known as Japanese chess and has the same end goal as regular Chess. Although they are similar in some areas of the game, there are some drastic differences which make it different from Chess. This has led me to find great interest in the game.
Shogi
The main objective of Shogi is basically the same as Chess which is to checkmate the King. Shogi has similar pieces (except for Queen) such as the King, Bishop, Rook, Knights and Pawns, with the addition of Lances, Silver, and Gold Generals.
All pieces have kanji on pieces that represent the different pieces along with their promoted variants and have kanji for their promoted version (sadly the King and Gold Generals don’t have one) which are printed in red. Surprisingly, the 3 rows of your opponents area is where you are allowed to promote compared to being just restricted to the final row to promote.
Unlike Chess where the pieces are just permanently put out of play, you are able to place the pieces that you’ve captured from the opponent once per turn. This is one part of the game that I liked, not necessarily because you can just keep getting more pieces, but because of how it allows for more ways of being able to threaten pieces, check the King and how it can help turn the tides of the game.
Although there are many other rules in Shogi that make it such an interesting, I think some are best left to keep this post short and can be mentioned more in-depth possibly in another article.
Experience with the game
I started doing Chess casually and started becoming more interested in some other board games such as Reversi (might talked upon in a later article) and card games. Then I saw it on sale and thought I might give it go, although I had no idea of what the game was or how it was played other than hearing that Shogi was similar to Chess.
After getting it, I’ve then started looking at the rules and realised that although some of the gameplay was similar, there were a lot of things that made it very confusing to how it worked. Following this, the rules became easier understand after looking at different explanations on these new rules.
The only issue which showed up after this was being able to remember the different kanji on the tiles as even though all the tiles were different sizes to signify the smaller pieces to the bigger pieces, it would be hard to remember which was what if you don’t constantly learn the different pieces. Recently this is becoming less of a problem but I still have I trouble with differentiating between some .
As of now, I’m still interested in the game and have enjoyed learning the game and playing it.
- Speedy