Introduction

Shogi is a two-player board game in the same family as Western chess, chaturanga, Chinese Xiangqi, and is the most popular of a family of chess variants native to Japan. Shōgi means general's (shō) boardgame (gi).

Perhaps the enduring popularity of Shogi can be attributed to its 'drop rule'; it was the first chess variant wherein captured pieces could be returned to the board to be used as one's own. David Pritchard credits the drop rule to the practice of 16th century mercenaries who switched loyalties when captured—no doubt as an alternative to execution.

This project is trial to create modern, windows based, professional, fully skinnable, pluggable, and localizable application for everyone. For those passersby who just want to waste 5 minutes playing with computer, for those novice who want to learn shogi analysing professional games and solving shogi problems, and even for those shogi professionals who need hmm... who knows what the hell they need in this life?

Installation

Installation for now is as simple as unpacking archive. Yet you must have OS WinXP SP2 or later with all updates and asian fonts installed. For those who don't want to install updates or still confront obstacles of other sorts I dedicate this "what-am-I-stupid?" wiki page.

The latest release notes

With the version 0.6 you can already play game over LAN, play with AI which makes random moves, or enter "don't check rules" mode and easily create any position on the board.

http://shogi-game.googlecode.com/svn/site/Game.PNG

Here you can find additional screenshots

Nearest subjects

I've just foung collection of game transcripts here so the next feature most likely to appear is loading game in PSN format.

The aim

Here you can find a list of all features I can think of, with estimates. As my random numbers generator wins me I don't know what features real players might need first. I will highly appreciate if you leave me your comments on this.