Let’s Learn Shogi

There is a board game that is hugely popular in Japan and is often referred to as Japanese chess. Finding someone in the United States who knows how to play would be very hard. However, with the invention of Artificial Intelligence and the right teaching tools, it’s possible for anyone to learn.

I bought a game on Steam which teaches me how to play Shogi and play against the computer.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1486050/Lets_Learn_Shogi

Last week I did a Twitch Stream where I launched the game for the first time and went through all the tutorials. I picked it up very quickly because I am already a chess player. You can watch it to learn along with me even if you don’t buy the game itself. I plan to master it and earn all the Steam achievements.

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2099981069

There are some very key differences between western chess and Japanese chess. First, knights don’t have 8 different squares they can move to. They only move in a similar way as how they can jump over pawns for the first move in western chess. Second, there is no Queen. There are the pieces King, Bishop, and Rook which operate exactly the same as western chess but there are also new pieces and different rules for them (especially pawns). I’m not going to go over all the differences in this post because I could never explain it as well as the game itself does.

But what I had the most problem with was that the pieces are Japanese symbols so I can’t tell them apart by memory. Take a look at the board here and you’ll see what I mean!

Unless you happen to know Japanese this will look like nonsense and probably stop you from trying to learn! However, I came up with a solution!

I took screenshots of each of the pages briefly explaining the pieces. These pages contain slightly larger images of the pieces than what shows during the game itself. Below are the screenshots so that I can always refer to this post and see which is which!

This post does not cover include the information about the promotion of pieces. Refer to the game itself for more on that. However, I can tell you that the promotion of most of the pieces gives them power equal to the Gold General. The bishop and rook however are special cases because they retain their existing moves but gain the ability to move like a king. This means that evolved bishops are far more powerful than they were in western chess, and they can move to any square on the board in 3 moves or less.

There are many more things that make the game of shogi much more complicated but interesting. However, I will end this post for now and share more in the future as I learn to be better at this game.

Update: since originally posting this I made a helpful image showing the names of all the pieces in just one picture! I refer to this when I am playing Let’s Learn Shogi.

I also made a small animated GIF which, while not as helpful as the image above, looks very cool.