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 Like a lot of the "intellectual" classic boardgames, it's great if you want a lot of pretty, minimalist wooden things. Shogi (将棋) Shogi is the Japanese equivalent of chess, and it has some cool ways that it's a little bit more like what you imagined chess was like when you started learning it as a kid. It looks slower, because in many ways it is, but it's because it involves a lot more overt showy planning and you can really see that something very, very bad is happening when something messes up. And when you do mess up, it doesn't just screw up a little bit. Suddenly your entire board position just burns down in hilarious ways you could never have anticipated. Material matters a lot less than tempo and the board positions of your remaining pieces, including the spaces between them, so a bad clash doesn't just lose you a couple of key pieces but can instead cause a complete rout in just a few moves. No I'm not bitter about a recent run against a new difficulty setting of AI opponent, what are you talking about. What is this thread? I decided to actually learn-learn shogi instead of it just being something I know the rules to and can gently caress around with, and I thought some goons might want to join me! I've technically been playing for 12 years, but at a rate of like 3 games every two years until a week ago so I figure people will catch up with me really quickly. I'm an acerbic weirdo but I'll try to keep a lid on it and feel free to just tell me to go gently caress myself if I'm rude. (I'm not actually mean! I'm just a very, very bad writer and a horrific pedant.) Basically I'm just gonna a give a brief overview of some rules and leave a place to put helpful links for now, and hope that works. Feedback is appreciated in whatever form is convenient except for like burning it into my lawn or something. If nothing else, I don't have a lawn. A Brief Rules Overview   A shogi board in the starting position with traditional pieces (left) and a take on "Western" pieces (right) (Just a brief note : traditionally the pieces are represented with just their names in Japanese written very prettily on little wooden planchets. With how drops work, you can't have two different colors and writing was one very easy way to have a definite "front" on each piece especially combined with making them pentagons. Plus it just jives really well with the natural wood and dark lacquer aesthetic that's common in a lot of sets. I think the traditional look is a steal for the cost of learning a dozen kanji, but I already learned Japanese so I would say that. If you don't want to deal with that, there's westernized sets that have a letter or a picture or even just a little diagram of how the peice moves and at least for the OP I'll try to not just make it a KANJI BOMB. And even I, the single most pretentious man alive, call it a "silver general" instead of a ginshō. If nothing else I had to find the diacritic for that vowel to type it.) I'm gonna briefly cover the pieces individually, but let's spend a second on some birds-eye-view points. The board's a 9x9 instead of an 8x8 with the starting position taking three lines instead or two : the front line is your pawns which are even weaker than pawns in chess, the rear line are a bunch of slow but powerful pieces and the middle line are your super weapons, a single bishop and rook. Yeah warned you the game seems a bit slower at the beginning. There's no equivalent of the queen, and you only get one of each of the other two far-ranging pieces. Everything else is either highly limited in direction or can only move one square at a time. This means that you spend a lot more time marching your little army mans across the board to get into a fight, but it also means that attacks aren't just one powerful piece rocketing across the board wrecking shop : instead you actually need to assemble an entire front and think about the logistics of your attack. This is what I mean about the game seeming to be slower, but actually not being slow. Yeah, it takes a while to get your dudes across the board, but it doesn't feel like a lazy slow game when your opponent is clearly and obviously doing an A-Team montage over there getting ready to make you eat boot for dinner. Especially because once things start dying, then the drops begin and it can start to go bad. Drops? Yeah, I mentioned them and they're shogi's big gimmick that should be familiar to any of you out there who play bug house : when you take an enemy piece, it's yours now. And you can put it in any unoccupied space on the board instead of moving a piece. Or well almost anywhere : it has to be legal for the piece to move afterwards, you can't have double pawns on a file and you can't drop a pawn into checkmate. But that checkmate rule is specific to pawns, checkmate drops with pieces are 100% normal and common and a thing you need to watch out for (and dropped pawns can still check, just not checkmate). Finally if you move in your opponent's starting three rows you promote into a new piece! That's the secret other reason why the game is played with tiles : when you promote you can just flip them over to their upgraded side. An invention that it would take hundreds of years for Ameri-trash boardgames to come up with. Don't worry, the promotions are formulaic and are gonna be exactly what you'd imagine a "better" version to be. I did phrase that very carefully though. "Move in the opponent's last three rows", you actually have to be moving around back there and not just dropped in. You can get dropped in and then do a move your normal way to promote, but paratroopers have to do something to earn respect in this game. And while we're doing fiddly promotion minutia, for most of the pieces promotion is optional (knights and lances must when they can, pawns at the last rank) but as a general rule you should always promote. It's more "you should promote, some exceptions apply including sneakery" and less "you must weigh this choice carefully", although even then there are some exceptions because it's an ancient complicated strategy game what did you expect. These are the two sides of the "rook".  飛車 means "flying chariot/cart/wagon"  竜 would be the normal way to write this but they're using an older form 龍 because it's just prettier, they're also writing in a more calligraphic style that's more like English cursive ; as a general rule the promoted sides are written in a fancier, more overtly artistic way. Also this character means "dragon". Yeah, your car is a dragon now. That's a thing that happens in this game from the middle ages. Getting excited yet? It's got some cool stuff in it, right? Pieces (They're called koma or goma when the sound changes get going in Japanese, but that's just the Japanese word for "Shogi piece" without any other sense and there's enough Japanese as is.)  You're gonna want this chart for the next section, but I promise you can have this down in like 4 minutes of play. Really, if you're anything like me the chart is gonna be the most help in visualizing the movements, but this should at least give context/commentary on what that means in the game and since I'm encouraging you to learn the characters I can provide a (short, I promise!) bit on that to try and help them make sense. The King (玉/王) Literally "king", although it's the same character as "jade" because that's what happens when you import your writing system from China. If you're trying to remember it, 2 Es leaning against each other back-to-back like a buddy cop movie poster does a trick. Or you can try getting drunk enough that it goes back to looking like a pictograph of a pretty rock, but be careful. It moves exactly like a king in chess. Lose this guy and it's all over. Although I think, giant emphasis on think, that it might be slightly different from chess's checkmate. In chess we're aware that the check ==> checkmate rule is modeling a taboo on regicide and by the time you get into chess enough to read about it you bump into the fact that the rule was formalizing a rule of etiquette that got so ubiquitous it might as well have been a rule. Supposedly shogi is like chess pulled just a bit back in time where it's not like a rule-rule, even though everyone acts like it's a rule and that's how everyone gets taught the game and if you broke it everyone would loving hate you and it's programmed into computer versions. Which since it's just a cultural thing anyway seems like a distinction without a difference ; it's not like the chess cops would arrest Carlsen if he got out a little guillotine and did some Robespierre cosplay. Or my friends are just lying dicks who are loving with me. They're friends with me so it's a highly viable possibility. And his team : The Golden General(金) Literally "gold" but like the medal-top class, not like metal-"goes clunk". The current hypothesis is that it might be a pictograph of some kind of ore pit, but this character is opaque to everyone. I like to imagine it's a little tea house on a rainy night and the dots towards the bottom are candles. Except I don't because I'm a dead husk inside but this was a better mnemonic than how I think of it as an abstract collection of lines. It can only move one square, but it can move directly forward, the two forward diagonals, sideways or directly back. (Every direction besides backwards-sashay reverse pawn attack on the backwards diagonals is how I think about it.) These are robust attackers and defenders that also offer a lot of support to neighboring pieces, with the only downside being that they go in reverse like child's drawing of a car. Being only able to move directly backwards is almost useless during a cluttered retreat so once you commit these duders down the board they ain't coming back. The Silver General(銀) Literally "silver", same deal. Also the character is literally just "gold" on the left written really tiny next to a character that sounds like "silver" in Chinese. Have I mentioned being careful when you import writing systems. There aren't any other pieces that have that "gold" thing in them, so you can remember them as "gold" and "the other metal one" pretty easy. Anyway the silver is the gold's sneakier cousin. It's got the front three squares including diagonals and the two back diagonals, but it can't cover its sides or move directly backwards. This means it punches as hard as the gold and it can scoot backwards in surprisingly agile ways, but it's a bit of a glass cannon when push comes to shove and it's not very good at sealing the deal. I've been playing around with putting them in a little diagonal screening force but I have no idea if that's actually good instead of just fun. I know it sounds a little silly that a few squares is that different but you'll really start feeling it the minute you have 3-4 pieces interacting. The Cassia Tree(桂) If you look this up in a shogi book they'll tell you this piece is called the knight, or sometimes the laureled knight. They are lying to you. That is the character for the cassia tree, like the thing we get cinnamon from. It became synonymous with a kind of respected official, but that still means tree and I'll have no truck with these lies. The bit on the left is literally a pictograph of a tree, it even still looks like a Christmas tree. The bit on the right is the phonetic to tell you how to pronounce it in Chinese (seriously, guys, make your own), but you can just remember to look out for a little tree. It does move like the chess knight though. Sort of. It teleports exactly 2 squares forward to the left or the right ; it can't "turn" like a knight can. Meaning it can't go backwards and it also can't go any direction besides forward like a drunk missile that skips and destroys whatever it lands on. Since it can still jump though it can effectively attack into the middle of scrums of pieces and if it dies it's not that bad (you know, unless you left an empty space two diagonal squares away from your king). I've been thinking about them as kind of like fussy artillery. The Incense Mobile（香車） Similar to the Sir Cinnamon above, it's usually translated as "lance" because that gives it a cool war-like feel. And that's what the top of the first character means : it's literally a pictograph of a kind of Bronze-age polearm. But that character means "fragrant, aromatic, incense" : it's the first character in Hong Kong which literally means "fragrant port" (make your own joke). The second character means car/cart/wagon/wheeled vroom thing and is literally a picture of a Bronze-age chariot seen from above. Like just turn your head to the side and you'll see it, zooming left and right. I don't know why there's a smell wagon on the battlefield. That's just the real riddle of shogi, I guess. This is a piece that can actually make a full real long-distance move. It can go as far as it wants as long as that direction is only straight forward. This is another one that can't turn. So far I haven't figured out how to use these with confident effectiveness. As is, they guard the living hell out of their file of the board, staring down at their opposing number each behind a pawn, where very little will ever go. So I don't know if I've ever even moved my own, because the most effective way I've found is to gobble up my opponent's and then drop those in a useful file, like right in the teeth of an active conflict. But the AI has never used this strategy which makes me wary. It's not like my dumb rear end is gonna break a thousand year old game with a pretty simple two-step strategy, and the AI is more than happy to do other evil things with drops, so it's weird that it's pretty much left my lances alone. All of these promote into moving like the gold general. The one exception to the "always promote" rule is that it's good to leave one unpromoted silver because if you're at the level of assault where you've got multiple battleship pieces into the opponent's house, it can be handy to have one little Solid Snake dude in among the giant bruisers. Especially because that one might live if the attack goes badly. And the big boys : The Flying Chariot （飛車） The second character we already learned, it's just that picture of a cart again. It's an ancient battlefield, there were some chariots, news at 11. The first character is literally the word for flying and historically is from someone trying to draw a picture of the concept of flying. It didn't work out well, which is why there aren't many characters like that. It also made it pretty god drat distinctive looking and annoying to write. It's great for your purposes though because you're never going to be expected to handwrite that in a legible manner to another person while jet lagged and you won't confuse it with anything else. It moves exactly like a rook in a game of pieces that can only move one square. It rolls around like someone tried playing pool with those balls from Phantasm. It's the single strongest piece in the game and its only downside is that you'll immediately get drunk with power, send it ahead without protection and lose your shiny toy. This piece is so powerful that the two biggest ways to use it have different sections when you read about game strategy. (They're called Ranging Rook and Resting Rook ; it's a question of whether you attack with it up front or keep it back as a defense and threat.) It promotes into the dragon where it gets one square of movement towards all diagonals and letting it kind of bend around corners. Also I think sometimes they make the character red but I don't know I'm biologically incapable of seeing red what do you want from me  The Horned Mover（角行） It's a moderately obscure character in modern Japanese (I actually typed it in Chinese because it was easier) that means like "oblique" and is an old word for horn, like an ox's two horns poking out. The top is in fact an old word for "horn", but that's a hardcore word-nerd fact. This one's really weird and distinctive with its little hat so I'm kind of hoping you'll be okay with it. I read Japanese and Chinese and I barely know this character, and even then only because it came up in a traditional Chinese wrestling context (long story). It moves like a bishop and is very much like the chariot but a bishop. Which means it's also a beast, but not quite as much because geometry's a bitch like that. Since the two start off facing each other, it seems pretty common to trade them relatively early as kind of like a weird mutual pact to turn this Mexican standoff into a knives-in-the-night ambush threat of where someone's going to drop their second most powerful piece at any moment. Promotes into the "spirited stallion" with basically the mirror of the dragon's movement. Making the "official" piece ranking Dragon > Chariot > Horsey > Horny Boy, at least for the capital-ship pieces. (There are various rankings of all the pieces by actual material cost and their cost in potentia in the hand waiting to be dropped and the exchange between those states, but there are multiple competing ones that seem to fundamentally all go back to some version of "an old Japanese dude got famous for thinking this was the best way to play shogi back when murder was legal if they were poor". I'm not including them because I don't know enough to even take an informed sample.) Also these guys exist : The Pawns(歩兵) The characters literally mean "infantry". The first means "to walk, to advance" and you can kind of imagine it like a dude holding his hand out to say "STOP" and he's got a big flowing anime robe on. The character breaks down but it's not particularly meaningful : the top is a collection of various sub-characters and the bottom is a (Chinese) phonetic that means "young" and is descended from a pictograph of a baby in swaddling clothes. The second character means low-ranking soldier, "grunt" but it's also the Chinese character for the "ping" in ping pong, the game. Because loving sure it is. (It got repurposed as a phonetic because it had fallen out of use as a military term and it actually does make sense as a phonetic there.) They can move forward one square. That's it. And they can't be two-to-a-file and protect each other, that's verboten. And they can check from a drop but not checkmate, so they can scare pieces and reinforce others but can't really lead the charge. Unless I promote them, the best use I've found is push them forward enough to be like barbed wire at The Somme. It's gonna be up in your face and I'm gonna cut the gently caress out of you while you try to get to me. Which ain't nothing, but almost a third of your pieces are basically a bunch of dropped lego bricks threatening your opponents footsies. Promoted however they still move like a gold general, which is pretty loving clutch. (For mysterious stylistic reasons its promoted form is written as と which is the Japanese phonetic "to" and the piece is called a tokin, but it walks and murders like a gold.) And since pieces don't keep their promoted status when they've been taken by an opponent, you can take one of their pawns, drop it in their zone, promote it, cause havoc on a little suicide mission to net some real pieces and then make a strategic sacrifice while only handing them back their own pawn. I've only gotten to do that once but it was intensely emotionally cathartic. A Meager Collection of Resources That Will Hopefully Grow This is the beta of an online shogi game that's kind of doing a Totally Not Chess.com thing. The AI is okay, it has match analysis (or it has the tools, I don't understand the game enough to work with the data) and it's got the standard modes you'd want out of a barebones online board game client. I've been messing around with a shogi app on my phone, but it's literally just the first generic shogi app I grabbed and it's in Japanese I already gave you the wikipedia page for shogi so ummm. Look I learned this game with an actual wooden board over beer and I just want some cool shogi friends to play shogi with. I didn't do any of that nerd poo poo, I was busy doing other, different nerd poo poo.
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Nov 9, 2022 08:01
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| # ? Apr 27, 2024 23:46 |
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Reserved for idk I'm planning ahead for once in my life.
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Nov 9, 2022 08:02
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Here's a good youtube channel about shogi. Suitable for beginners. https://www.youtube.com/user/HIDETCHI By the way, shogi is a ridiculous game https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7iZQdP7nPOg
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Nov 9, 2022 08:46
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totalnewbie posted:Here's a good youtube channel about shogi. Suitable for beginners. https://www.youtube.com/user/HIDETCHI O it's loving ridiculous nonsense and I love it. One option for the reserved post was just weird fringe shogi poo poo like this loving madness.  That's the 36x36 full-battle Taikyoku Shogi, with however many squares that is, well over a thousand. It's got all sorts of extra pieces too like the drunk elephant, a bunch of Buddhist demons, animal spirits and a bear that just promotes into another, different, better bear. It must take forever to play and be terrible the whole time and it's all I want to do in life. Edit :  I rest my case. Xiahou Dun fucked around with this message at 09:03 on Nov 9, 2022 |
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Nov 9, 2022 08:59
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Between mahjong and this its like a conspiracy to get me reading Japanese isn't it?
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Nov 9, 2022 18:25
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Mahjong you really don't have to learn any Chinese characters. There are only about a dozen in a whole set and they're all distinctive enough that whenever I've taught mahjong I could just say, "Yeah, that one," and trust they'd remember it as well as anything else. Shogi you can be up and running with just 7 characters ("king", "gold", "silver", "cassia tree", "perfume", "oblique", "fly"), but you do actually have to know those well enough you won't lose by forgetting what piece is what. That being said, if you actually want to learn some Japanese just for funnsies it's a decent place to start and I can throw some resources your way if you want. It's a LOT easier to deal with characters now that touch screens are ubiquitous ; I still have to look up characters the old fashioned way for work stuff, and whenever younger people see me do that you'd think they caught me knapping flint and tanning hides in a cave. Nowadays you just need to know how to write things legibly enough for a computer to realize what you mean, unless you need a weird rear end character like 角.
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Nov 9, 2022 18:54
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Learn Chinese first. It makes learning Japanese Kanji much easier. Also, there's a variant called hasami shogi that kids play. I don't know what it's all about but it's much more simplified.
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Nov 9, 2022 18:56
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totalnewbie posted:Learn Chinese first. It makes learning Japanese Kanji much easier. You mean I wasn't supposed to spend 3 years learning Japanese with a couple thousand kanji just by rote memorization only to learn how to say "cat" in Chinese and almost cry because the writing system makes sense? What a crazy idea. I had never heard of hasami shogi, but from glancing at the rules it looks like it's almost completely unconnected except for using the board and pieces, kind of like playing checkers with chess pieces. It seems like it's 9 vs 9 with pieces that move like chess rooks and you're trying to surround enemy pieces like in go, sort of. I can't find an online client for it, but I have Tabletop Simulator and we can probably figure something out with a little bit of effort there. Still looks fun at hell.
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Nov 9, 2022 19:20
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My entire experience with Shogi has always been thinking that it looks really cool but never actually learning how to play it. Then trying it in one of the Yakuza games are just going "oh no. oh no. oh no." escalating in both frequency and intensity as whatever NPC I was playing relentlessly annihilates me. Thanks for the YouTube link, that'll give me a starting point to grab on to. Let's see if I can surpass my ability at Go (utterly awful, might as well just be playing randomly) and bring my Shogi skills up to the level of my Chess skills (utterly awful but good enough to beat most of my friends)
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Nov 10, 2022 03:44
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| # ? Apr 27, 2024 23:46 |
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Yeah I played through the shogi challenges in a Yakuza game at one point, they were pretty easy overall if you already know the game.
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Nov 10, 2022 04:41
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