Talk:Sho shogi

Early talk

Looking good! kwami 20:21, 11 December 2005 (UTC)

Baring rule, impasse

Where does this claim that bare King loses come from? I have never heard of that. I am a bit skeptical whether the information given here is correct, because the mention of impasse as both Kings being in their own promotion zone as a draw seems most certainly wrong. It makes no sense at all. This is a rule for drop games, where residing in the zone means all the pieces (and in particular Pawns) dropped to strengthen the King fortress instantly promote. So that an attacker can never hope to break it down. In drop games having your King in the zone has no special advantage at all. The side ahead in material just trades everything (possibly after promoting it as well, which you cannot very well prevent if you are staying in your own zone), leaving your King bare, and then mating it. Traded pieces won't return anywhere on the board. And if the stuff about impasse is pure nonsense, the clame about the baring rule might be as well. H.G.Muller (talk) 21:07, 16 March 2015 (UTC)

@H.G.Muller: Tagged bare king with "citation needed", and removed the stuff about impasse (which somehow got its way onto dai shogi and Heian dai shogi as well). I suspect that they originated from copy-and-paste errors and stayed over the years because these are really uninteresting variants and so nobody bothered to check, so kudos to you! (Witness how the only variants I want to make rule "urtexts" for are chu and tenjiku, because sho and dai are boring and the higher ones have so many minute rule variations between sources!) Double sharp (talk) 21:14, 16 March 2015 (UTC)

Btw, do you know if there exists an on-line machine-readable version of this 'Sho Shogi Zushiki'.? I would like to try my luck on it with Google translate, to see what exactly it says on King baring in Sho or Chu. The interpretation of some historic Chu texts: "they mention Gold, so they must mean any piece, as all pieces are stronger than Gold or promote to one that is" has always struck me as complete nonsense. As to the larger Shogi variants: I have designed smaller versions of Tenjiku, Dai Dai and Maka Dai Dai, all on 13x13 with around 50 pieces per side, (so about Chu-size), in the hope to make these games more playable. I posted these on chessvariants.org under the names Nutty Shogi, Cashew Shogi and Macadamia Shogi. I intend to implement them in my engine HaChu, even before I get to their larger originals. When selecting which pieces to keep, I preferred those with uncontested moves. But you cannot get around the Lion Dog when you want to reproduce the authentic flavor of the larger originals. So I am really curious as to what the primary sources say about Lion Dog, that there could be such a wide variation in interpretation, ranging all the way from a Q3 to a triple area move with full Lion powers. There seems to be a tension between the statement that Furious Fiend = Lion + Lion Dog, where everyone seems to agree that it could not jump or trample when moving to the 3rd square, and that Teaching King = Lion Dog + Queen, which only makes sense if the Lion Dog provided some extras. I wonder if the solution to this (which never seems to have been considered by anyone) can be that the Lion Dog had two-step linear Lion power (like Chu HF and SE) in all directions, plus a range-3 slide. (From the Japanese Wikipedia + Google Translate I got the impression that one of the three historic sources describes the Lion Dog as only having range 2.) Then the Lion power of LD would be eclipsed by the Lion in Furious Fiend, like the slide would be eclipsed by the Queen component in Teaching King, but the Lion power would remain there. H.G.Muller (talk) 11:28, 20 March 2015 (UTC)

@H.G.Muller: I've never found online versions of any of the principal sources, but I see that our Edo-era shogi sources page includes ISBNs for Shōgi Zushiki and Shōgi Rokushu no Zushiki. A pity about Sho shōgi zushiki, though. I would indeed like to know what the traditional rule in chu shogi is: the most commonly encountered ruleset (TSA) seems to impose many of its own interpretations of the text that on close examination are not historically founded. The inventors of these variants were almost certainly not stupid (although they may indeed have been megalomaniacs), and when looking at the primary sources we should definitely assume that they said exactly what they meant. Reading between the lines, while well-intentioned, can very quickly bring us down the road of falsification.

I took a look at your variants. They seem very cool and playable! I kind of miss the great general from tenjiku, but there's no space to put it, and it's a compound anyway. (Was the historical dai→chu shrinkage an inspiration? It also keeps all the powerful pieces and gets rid of mostly the weak ones, although that's an obvious decision.) I think I might give them a try – I think they do indeed preserve a lot of the spirit of the game by keeping the strongest pieces and a few representative weaker ones, but still speeding it up. (I won't say it preserves the whole spirit of the game, because surely some of the spirit of them is the ridiculous vastness, but since that scares away novices I think it's good to do away with it for creating updated versions! XD)

Indeed, I figured that if Dai had improved so much by shrinking it to Chu, perhaps something similar could be done for the other large variants. As to the Great General, it is still available as a promotion piece in Nutty Shogi. Initially I even left both VG and GG out of the initial setup (which was in line with leaving out other end-points of the various promotion chains as well, (Lion Hawk and Free Eagle), except of course the Fire Demon, without which the game would just not feel the same. (And I broke the Rook and Bishop chains into two, by leaving HF and SE out of the initial setup; these are cases I am not sure promotion to BG/RG is not a demotion anyway.) So initially I had 2BG and one RG to radiate out from the single FD, but then I realized that the BG would be on the same square color, while originally they are on different colors. So I had to replace one BG by a VG, which can change color through its area move. The problem still exists for the Bishop, but I figured this was an insignificant-enough piece that this would not matter. It seemed more important to keep the orthogonal-diagonal slider alternation directly behind the Pawns, to make sure all squares in front of the Pawns cannot become FD targets, and this makes it unavoidable all diagonal sliders are on the same square color.H.G.Muller (talk) 11:26, 21 March 2015 (UTC)

@H.G.Muller: Ah, I see it now! My desire for symmetry is now satisfied. :-)

I don't think there's a need to do this for tai shogi, BTW, because it doesn't seem to add any significantly new high-powered pieces. (My usual reaction to taikyoku is just throwing up my hands in desperation.) Ko shogi could be slightly problematic on a smaller board, due to the long-range shooting pieces: I think some thought would be required for that one. It seems nice, but the 19×19 size is definitely too high. (I always thought the optimal size for a chess-like game to catch on was somewhere in the 6×6 to 12×12 range, with perhaps up to 16×16 workable if not too many new pieces are introduced. Of course I could be totally wrong. XD My data value for the high side was for the shogi variants, as we know that chu and dai caught on for a while, and tenjiku doen't seem completely inaccessible. My low end admittedly has no substantial grounding in fact.)

P.S. If you want alternative Japanese-style names, to retain some of the flavour of the old games: we could have tenjiku chu shogi for Nutty. I dunno enough Japanese for Cashew and Macadamia; they're both the same size, so dai-chu and maka-dai-chu (as you suggest here) may be slightly inappropriate. Maybe we could repurpose the meaning of dai, and call the old 15×15 one Edo dai shogi. So we would have them as "first dai shogi" and "second dai shogi", whatever those would become in Japanese. Double sharp (talk) 16:48, 21 March 2015 (UTC)

I might still dare to try the original tenjiku, but not the higher ones. In fact the original tenjiku seems crafted to be an accessible large variant to the chu player, by just extending promotion chains (and adding two new ones, which are not easy to forget due to their massively powerful pieces), instead of adding tremendous amounts of new pieces like dai-dai and up.

Concerning the lion dog, your idea seems very plausible: not only does it make sense (unlike the traditional English rule), I don't think there are any lion-movers that go above 2 steps in any variants other than taikyoku. And, as you mentioned on your recent post, it would make it unnecessary to ever mention the lion dog's move, which could lead to misunderstandings by later sources! Double sharp (talk) 14:44, 20 March 2015 (UTC)

"immediate predecessor"

In fact, according to Masukawa's 2004 paper, modern shogi was still called sho shogi when chu shogi had not yet been driven to near-extinction. (Hodges may be right that chu shogi never died, but only in the sense that there were always players. Right now there are surely people who know the rules of tenjiku – I know I do – but the game never really lived in the sense that shogi does now and that chu shogi once did.) Double sharp (talk) 08:35, 7 March 2016 (UTC)

Timing of the elimination of drops

@H.G.Muller: I have to wonder about this, since it is uncited, and because I don't see why sho shogi with drops should be a problem if you are not allowed to drop a royal or potential royal (which is actually exactly how it works even today in standard shogi), as suggested here. Double sharp (talk) 05:13, 15 August 2017 (UTC)

@Double sharp: I am still digesting this very interesting reference (my French is a bit rusty), and have not gotten to the part dealing with your remark above. But I did already encounter something very significant: they quote a description of Heian Shogi, and it seems the last sentence of it does describe a baring rule. Since Heian Shogi obviously must have been derived from Chaturanga/Shatranj somehow, it is of course not unlikely it could have inherited this rule. Not that it really seems needed in this game: Gold has mating potential on 9x9, and everything promotes to Gold. It would still change the case of pieces cut off from their King and attacked from behind, though. This puts the remark about the 'unpromoted Gold against bare King' in the 1703 Chu-Shogi description in a somewhat different light. H.G.Muller (talk) 07:40, 28 August 2017 (UTC)

@H.G.Muller: Thanks for that observation! (For reference, the sentence is "敵玉一将則為勝" in the Nichūreki.) What is even more interesting is that checkmate has apparently not been listed at all as a game-ending condition; only king baring. Is that significant, I wonder? It may well mean that king baring was considered a more fundamental form of victory than checkmate in those times. This seems to make it more likely that you can win in general by king baring in Chu, but once again we have a frustrating lack of confirmation. Double sharp (talk) 10:48, 28 August 2017 (UTC)

Well, it only makes sense to talk about King baring if there is some guarantee that the King will be that last-surviving piece. So I assume loss of the King would mean loss of the game. I agree it is strange that this is not mentioned when existence and popularity of other chess variants do not make this obvious. H.G.Muller (talk) 11:29, 28 August 2017 (UTC)

@H.G.Muller: One very singular point about the shogi branch of the chess family is that unlike Shatranj (and just about all its other descendants), it appears that there was no notion of check for a long while. (Which must have been lost somewhere along the line, because Makruk has it, and it is clearly on the path to Shogi with its large promotion zone and pawns on the third rank.) If you left your king under attack, your opponent just took it, and you lost. So king baring seems to have been on a par with king taking as a victory condition, rather than checkmate. (And of course this state of affairs would make the idea of having a second king which also had to be taken seem very natural, unlike how weird it feels in FIDE chess!) Perhaps this was changing in the heyday of Chu, as Fairbairn mention in his 1980 article: "The old texts also gave a fatuous rule that if a player overlooks a check on his King in the first 20 moves (10 moves Western style) he loses." Double sharp (talk) 12:30, 28 August 2017 (UTC)

P.S. Oh, and my initial remark is not part of the main article, but it is raised in the comments to it. Double sharp (talk) 10:59, 28 August 2017 (UTC)

Promotion rule

I find it somewhat unexpected that the promotion rule as given (allowing moves out of the zone as well) are the same as those for modern shogi rather than those of chu shogi. Double sharp (talk) 04:21, 1 April 2019 (UTC)