Euroshogi

[Ferdy]

How many engines can play this variant? It seems like an interesting shogi variant. How popular is this variant?

[hgm]

Shokidoki plays it, and Sjaak II andNebiyu can be configured to play it. I would be surprised if any humans played it.

Euro-Shogi was designed by a Slowakian guy ('Max Prilin'), as an attempt to introduce Shogi to Chess players. He hired a programmer to make a stand-alone program for it ( http://www.cubiccheckers.com/en/cshogi/?page=download ). But they got into a disagreement before the program was fully debugged, with as a result he was left with a program where the Dragon Horse did not have the correct move (the backward step was missing). I fixed that for him, which was sort of a miracle, because I could not compile his sources for lack of libraries used for the GUI part. So I disassembled and patched the binary to add the extra move.

I don't expect the program would have sparked any interest, either amongst Chess or Shogi players. Shogi players won't like it, because the pieces he used in the GUI have no Japanese scribbles. And the 'Chess-like' representation of the pieces he used are photographs of actual pieces rather than diagram symbols, of a glass piece set where white and black are hardly distinguishable shades of light blue.

I added it to Shokidoki because it was trivial to do so. I will probably add it to CrazyWa as well, in a future release. Together with Yari Shogi (another Western Shogi variant without players?) and perhaps Kyoto Shogi. At least the latter is popular in Japan, but it will require some extra support in WinBoard.

[Norbert Raimund Leisner]

Well Ferdy,

I tested only some USI compatible engines with Shogidokoro and ShogiBoard including normal Japanese Chess, but HGM´s statement is here:

Shokidoki now (as of May 13, 2015) also supports Euro-Shogi, an 8x8 variant designed by Max Prilin. This variant has no Lance or Silver, but each side starts with a pair of Bishops. The Knights can also make a sideway step.

http://www.cubiccheckers.com/en/cshogi/ seems to be the official EuroShogi website

http://shogi-cz.webnode.cz/

https://play.google.com/store/apps/deta ... hogi&hl=de

https://sourceforge.net/p/euroshogi/code/ref/master/

This website has no download files, but you can contact directly "mentalista" a.k.a. Vladimir Pribylinec after a free registration at SourceForge.

usr/lib/python3.6/site-packages/pychess/Variants/euroshogi.py is mentioned here:

https://www.archlinux.org/packages/comm ... ess/files/
(Arch Linux website) > pychess 0.12.4-2 File List

Best wishes,
Norbert

[Norbert Raimund Leisner]

http://pychess.readthedocs.io/en/latest ... .euroshogi

[Evert]

Shokidoki plays it, and Sjaak II andNebiyu can be configured to play it. I would be surprised if any humans played it.

That, of course, doesn't mean much. They might play it if they could easily do it (therein lies the appeal of a program like SjaakII and ChessV: you can easily try out other variants you do not know without having to download a dedicated program). Oddly enough, people use SjaakII to play "Maharaja and the Sepoys", so there's no easy way to tell what people find interesting to play.
The game appears to be quite functional, but it's not so obvious why you'd pick this game over regular Shogi. I guess the appeal might be that you can play it with two Western Chess sets and a stack of draughts, but that hardly matters for computer play.

Euro-Shogi was designed by a Slowakian guy ('Max Prilin'), as an attempt to introduce Shogi to Chess players. He hired a programmer to make a stand-alone program for it ( http://www.cubiccheckers.com/en/cshogi/?page=download ). But they got into a disagreement before the program was fully debugged, with as a result he was left with a program where the Dragon Horse did not have the correct move (the backward step was missing). I fixed that for him, which was sort of a miracle, because I could not compile his sources for lack of libraries used for the GUI part. So I disassembled and patched the binary to add the extra move.

[gbtami]

http://pychess.readthedocs.io/en/latest ... .euroshogi

Euroshogi was never implemented in PyChess. euroshogi.py modul is there, but unfinished. Seems it's not interesting enough for human players.

[Ferdy]

Shokidoki plays it, and Sjaak II andNebiyu can be configured to play it. I would be surprised if any humans played it.

I can load Shokidoki in WB to play euroshogi, but not Sjaak.
I cannot find euroshogi here.

Euro-Shogi was designed by a Slowakian guy ('Max Prilin'), as an attempt to introduce Shogi to Chess players. He hired a programmer to make a stand-alone program for it ( http://www.cubiccheckers.com/en/cshogi/?page=download ). But they got into a disagreement before the program was fully debugged, with as a result he was left with a program where the Dragon Horse did not have the correct move (the backward step was missing). I fixed that for him, which was sort of a miracle, because I could not compile his sources for lack of libraries used for the GUI part. So I disassembled and patched the binary to add the extra move.

So far I only tried the android app. I have not yet encountered the dragon horse.

I don't expect the program would have sparked any interest, either amongst Chess or Shogi players. Shogi players won't like it, because the pieces he used in the GUI have no Japanese scribbles. And the 'Chess-like' representation of the pieces he used are photographs of actual pieces rather than diagram symbols, of a glass piece set where white and black are hardly distinguishable shades of light blue.

The one thing that is difficult to me as a chess player trying to play shogi is the pawn in shogi, it would take me some time to analyze the position because of that pawn movement . Mini is manageable though.

Site like Lichess has a good potential of popularizing variants.

[Ferdy]

Well Ferdy,

I tested only some USI compatible engines with Shogidokoro and ShogiBoard including normal Japanese Chess, but HGM´s statement is here:

Did you find other engines that can play euroshogi other than Shokidoki?

[Ferdy]

http://pychess.readthedocs.io/en/latest ... .euroshogi

Euroshogi was never implemented in PyChess. euroshogi.py modul is there, but unfinished. Seems it's not interesting enough for human players.

If this is implemented in Lichess, it would have a chance to be popular.

[Evert]

Shokidoki plays it, and Sjaak II andNebiyu can be configured to play it. I would be surprised if any humans played it.

I can load Shokidoki in WB to play euroshogi, but not Sjaak.
I cannot find euroshogi here.

You need to set the variant definition file (under "engine options") to the "variants.txt" that comes with the package.
Euro Shogi is not a built-in variant, it is defined in the configuration file. This isn't loaded automatically (which, yes, is a bug).