Learning the basic rules of shogi is quick and easy. Many young children play Japanese chess. If you have ever played Chess, you have a head start, but knowing Western Chess is not a prerequisite to learning Japanese Chess.

Traditionally, Japanese calligraphy is used to mark the pieces in Shogi. Don’t let the kanji on shogi pieces scare you off. There are other styles of shogi sets that have pictures, arrows or letters instead of kanji. Later, once you’ve become familiar with shogi, you’ll probably pick up the Japanese symbols. But, that’s later.

Shogi boards aren’t easily found outside of Japan. You can check Amazon or other retailers for boards. Also, for a cheap quick board, you can print out some of my PDF’s of shogi boards and pieces for a do-it-yourself shogi set that doesn’t cost much.

I wrote the following shogi rules explanation several years ago, and included a version of them in my book, Tsume Puzzles for Japanese Chess.

Rules of Shogi

The game of Shogi is similar to the game of Chess. They both derive from the same game. One version evolved as it travelled to Europe, and the other changed as it made its way to Japan. Shogi traditionally uses kanji to distinguish which piece (called a token) is which. To people that know kanji, the pieces are attractive and full of imagery. (more…)

Shogi, aka Japanese Chess, is an extremely fun and challenging variant of Chess. Actually the two versions of chess are cousins. Shogi, pronounced SHOW-gee with a hard ‘G’, is the western version of a game that was created in India several centuries ago. Chess is the European version of the same game.

Just as you have many variants on Western Chess, there are several variants of Shogi. The main version of shogi is played on an 9×9 square board (one bigger than chess). Japanese Chess tends to be a bit more challenging than Western Chess, but still very fun for beginners and masters alike.

One of the most interesting Shogi rules is that tokens that are captured become the enemy’s pieces, and he can then drop them back on the board to strengthen his army. This adds a great deal of strategy to the game as pieces appear from seemingly nowhere to block checks or quickly promote.

I have a very rough beta version of shogi for play online. You can play it by clicking the image below. It will take you to the page, and let you play against the computer. The AI is a bit weak, but I’m working on fixing that in future versions.

Everyone’s introduction to shogi is unique. My introduction was from a friend that was Japanese. He was very tired of me beating him at Western chess, so one day he pulled out a Japanese chess board and said, Let’s try this for a while. He thoroughly beat me many times and then gave me the shogi board as a present.

This was in the days before the Internet, so wrote down the rules for future reference and taught my own children how to play when they were old enough to learn the rules of shogi.

I’m just getting started on this site, so keep checking back for updates.