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1 Rules of the game

1.1 Objective

The objective is to capture your opponent's king.

1.2 Game equipment

Two players, Black and White (or Sente and Gote), play on a board comprised of squares in a grid of 9 ranks (rows) by 9 files (columns). The squares are undifferentiated by marking or colour.

Each player has a set of 20 pieces, listed below.

• 1 king
• 2 gold generals
• 2 silver generals
• 2 knights
• 2 lances
• 1 bishop
• 1 rook
• 9 pawns

Most of the English-language names are chosen to correspond to their rough equivalents in Western chess, not necessarily as translations of the Japanese names.

Each piece has its name in the form of two Japanese characters marked on its face. On the reverse side of each piece (other than kings and gold generals) are one or two other characters, often in a different colour (e.g., red instead of black); this reverse side is used to indicate that the piece has been promoted during play. The pieces do not differ in colour, but instead each piece is shaped to show its direction, and this determines who controls the piece during play. See Shogi Pieces and Symbols for pictures of the pieces, both normal and promoted.

Many people who are not Japanese have been deterred from learning shogi due to the perceived difficulty of learning the Japanese characters used on the pieces. This has lead to the development of "westernized" (or "international") pieces, which replace the Japanese characters with more intuitive symbols. But players soon learn to recognize the Japanese pieces, so westernized pieces have never become very popular.

Here is a table of the pieces, with their Japanese representation:

English speakers sometimes refer to promoted bishops and promoted rooks as horses and dragons, after their Japanese names, and often use the Japanese word tokin for promoted pawns. Silver generals and gold generals are commonly referred to simply as silvers and golds.

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ShogiShogi shogi ) is one of a family of strategic board games of which chess and xiangqi are also members, which originated from the 6th century Indian game of chaturanga or a close relative thereof. Shogi is native to Japan, and is sometimes called Japanese Shogi variantMany variants of shogi have been developed over the years, ranging from some of the largest chess-like games ever played, to some of the smallest. Some of these games are still regularly played, though none are currently anywhere near as popular as shogi