Japanese Chess
Master the ancient game of Shogi
Description
Picture two players facing a wooden board of eighty-one squares, each holding twenty flat, wedge-shaped pieces that all point the same way — toward the enemy. There are no colors here, no black army against a white one. The only thing telling your pieces from your opponent's is which direction they face. This is shogi, the Japanese cousin of chess, a game Trevor Leggett spent much of his life learning, playing, and eventually explaining to Western readers who had grown up on bishops and queens. Leggett, a judo teacher and translator who lived in Japan for years, wrote his guide precisely because so little existed in English for the curious outsider.
At first glance shogi looks like chess with the paint stripped off — same grid, same idea of cornering a king. But the resemblance is a trap. In chess, a captured piece is dead, swept off the board, gone for good. In shogi, a piece you capture becomes yours. You can put it back into play, on your side, pointing at the friends it just betrayed. Nothing is ever truly lost, and the board never empties out the way a chessboard does. The material simply keeps circulating, and the tension keeps rising until the very last move.
That single rule — the drop — reshapes everything else, from how pieces are valued to how a game is won. Leggett's guide walks the beginner from the shape of the board to the moment they can hold their own against a friend, without drowning them in jargon or treating shogi as an exotic curiosity. It is, in his hands, simply a good game worth learning.
The question we’re asking : What makes shogi a genuinely different game from the chess most of us already know, rather than just a foreign variation on it?What we’ll see : How the pieces move and transform, why captured material comes back to haunt you, and what a board full of recycled pieces says about the culture that built it.
Table of contents
01Chapter 1 — The board where nothing dies
Shogi is played on a board of nine files by nine ranks — eighty-one squares in all, slightly larger than the sixty-four of Western chess. The squares are undivided by color; the whole surface is a plain wooden grid. Each player starts with twenty pieces arranged across three ranks: a bottom row of major pieces, a middle rank holding the rook and bishop off to the sides, and a full front rank of nine pawns. The setup is symmetrical, and both armies face inward toward the middle of the board, waiting.
The pieces themselves are the first thing that throws a chess player. They are flat, five-sided tablets of wood, all the same cream color, distinguished only by the Japanese characters written on their faces. Ownership is shown by orientation: your pieces point their narrow ends away from you, toward the opponent, and a captured piece is simply rotated to face the other way. Leggett is patient here, walking the reader through recognizing each piece by its character before worrying about how it moves, because until you can read the board at a glance, nothing else follows.
02Chapter 2 — Pieces that promote, pieces that turn
The individual pieces of shogi will feel both familiar and strange. There is a king, a rook that slides along ranks and files, and a bishop that runs on diagonals — all recognizable to a chess player. But there is no queen, that all-powerful piece of Western chess, and the pawns move and capture in a way that surprises: they advance one square straight ahead and capture straight ahead too, never diagonally. Around the king sit the gold and silver generals, pieces with no chess equivalent, each moving in its own restricted pattern that Leggett takes care to lay out square by square.
The knight is the oddest survivor. It jumps like a chess knight but only forward, to one of two squares ahead — it can never retreat or move sideways. The lance slides any distance straight forward and nowhere else. These pieces are committed, almost reckless, always pushing toward the enemy and unable to come back. Their one-directional nature gives shogi much of its forward-driving pressure; an army of pieces that mostly cannot retreat is an army built for attack.
03Chapter 3 — The drop that changes everything
The rule that truly separates shogi from every Western form of chess is the drop. When you capture an enemy piece, it does not leave the game — it joins your reserve, your "pieces in hand," and on any later turn you may spend a move placing it anywhere on the board as your own. It arrives unpromoted, facing the opponent, ready to fight for its new owner. Leggett calls this the single most important idea a chess player must absorb, and he is right: it rewires the entire strategy of the game.
Because material keeps returning, no exchange is ever clean. When you take a piece, you gain a resource; when you lose one, you have armed your enemy. The board therefore never simplifies into the quiet, thinly-populated endings that chess players know. Pressure builds rather than releases. A player who is materially behind is never safe, because every piece they capture is a fresh weapon they can drop back into the fight at the moment of their choosing.
04Chapter 4 — A game that mirrors its country
It is hard to spend time with shogi and not sense something distinctly Japanese in its logic. The refusal to discard captured pieces, the insistence that everything be reused rather than thrown away, reads almost like a philosophy of resources rather than a mere game rule. Where chess is a duel of two fixed armies that grind each other down to nothing, shogi treats every soldier as convertible, capable of switching allegiance and serving again. Leggett, who lived in Japan long enough to translate its martial and spiritual writings, presents this not as a gimmick but as the heart of the game's character.
The captured piece that changes sides carries an unmistakable echo of how allegiances worked in Japan's own feudal history, where a defeated warrior might well end up serving the lord who beat him. The game does not moralize about this; it simply builds it into the rules and lets players live inside the consequences. Loyalty in shogi is a matter of which way a piece happens to be facing, and that facing can change with a single capture. There is a hard-headed realism in it, a sense that nothing and no one is ever permanently out of the fight.
05Conclusion
Come back to those two players at the eighty-one-square board, each holding twenty identical wedges of wood. What looked at first like chess in a plainer costume turns out to be a game with its own physics: pieces that turn over to grow stronger, pieces that jump only forward and cannot come home, and above all pieces that never truly die but keep switching sides and dropping back into the fray. Leggett's whole aim is to carry a curious Western reader across that gap, from the false comfort of recognizing a rook and a king to the genuine strangeness of a board that refuses to empty.
