将棋 - Shogi
Japanese chess
Category: Leisure
11/05/2006
I like all kinds of games (video games, cards, board games, puzzles,...) and we went, with a friend from the student village, to a couple of shops to find a board game. Unfortunately we couldn't find anything nice! In France, the board games market has grown a lot over the last few years and there's plenty of nice games, but in Japan it doesn't seem to be the case. However I'm not going to give up, at least I can try to introduce people to the "Werewolves of Thiercelieux" (a great atmosphere game). And if I can manage to train tarot or coinche players (two great French card games), then I'll be really happy. You can expect me to try!
In the end, we didn't find what we were looking for, but I'd heard about shogi (Japanese chess) and I'd been willing to try for quite some time, so I ended up buying a shogi board. I had the rules explained by another student, who's been playing in a club for some time, and we played a round...of course I got my ass kicked. I then played a few games with Tom, who's a beginner as well.
I have an excellent overall first impression about the game. Here's the board:
As you can see, everything's written in Japanese, and this is probably one of the reasons why the game doesn't have much success abroad. It's a shame, since the game offers nice gameplay mechanics and seems to be highly tactical. I really enjoyed the few games I played. I won't go over the rules in details, but I'll roughly describe how it differs from chess:
- captured pieces can be reused very effectively, because they can be replaced virtually anywhere on the board. As a consequence, it's crucial to build a solid defense, otherwise a piece that was previously captured by the opponent can reappear in a very dangerous spot.
- most pieces can be promoted and become more powerful, under specific conditions of course. That brings additional parameters to take into account when developing a strategy.
- pieces are individually weaker: there are two pieces that behave respectively as the bishop and the rook but apart from that, the others are rather limited in terms of movement. For instance, the knight only targets two squares. Several pieces cannot move backward. It's a bit confusing at first, but it's just a different gameplay and it's really not hard to get used to it.
Overall, the game opening is slower, pieces can't be deployed as fast, but the mid and end-game are really aggressive. The rules are a little more complex than for chess, but it's really not that hard. After a couple games, I'm starting to understand some strategy basics. I enjoyed the game so much that I'm going to try to find a club, and check out if there's organized sessions at school. I'll keep you posted.
The battle is fierce :
I've just found how to get out of a dangerous situation :
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