Large Shogi vaiants

[Kirill Kryukov]

Indeed. Although the 'purists' of course will always demand the kanji (and probably lose 300 Elo useing them to play! ).

Well playing the usual 9x9 shogi with kanji pieces is not terrubly much of a challenge after some getting used to, but starting from Chu Shogi and larger I'm having difficulties reading the board. So any diagrammatic set improvements are very welcome, especially for us, guyjins (westerners).

So WinBoard can do these too: [...]

Atually these are kind of auto-generated too: I just have WinBoard directy ender the kanji text on the display, from a Japanese font in shift_jis encoding. So no bitmaps of each piece are needed, just a list of names of the pieces as text in the proper encoding (made by someone who assists me in this). The user can select the font and point size. WinBoard just has to supply a few different sizes of 'koma' as bitmaps, and then renders the text on top of it.

Well the prettiness of the kanji-based set can certainly be much improved, but myself I won't use it anyway.

It is quite remarkable the Japanese do not seem able to make a distinction between the abstract game and the material with which it is played. In Chess we play pretty much with anything (I have seen piece sets made out of Star Wars personalities), and our diagrams look nothing like Staunton pieces. But to a Japanese something that doesn't use kanji pieces just is not Shogi!

Interesting observation. May be it reflects the difference between cultulres. We westerners tend to divide things into good and evil, so our pieces are clearly painted black and white. In shogi a piece is "white" or "black" depending on who's side it's on at the moment. Inflexibility of marking the pieces is offset by flexibility of the piece itself. Also, the idea of promoting by flipping the piece upside down is pretty neat - you can be sure that you won't run out of queens.

As for the larger variants, my theory is that being able to play them (with any pieces) has something to do with being a monk.

Does winboard support Taikyoku shogi?

[hgm]

Does winboard support Taikyoku shogi?

It is in the works! But Taikyoku pieces in general move differently than their namesakes from the saller games. So basically the piece list has to be done from scratch, while Tai was just a combination of Dai Dai and aka Dai Dai, with only a hand full of new pieces.

The real challenge is making an engine for these extremely big variants, however. For that I am still working on Chu, which is hard enough.