Board Game Discussion - We don't talk about Shogi
25Shogi, often referred to as "Japanese Chess", comes to us from the same era as Western Chess, but has an incredibly deeper strategic aspect, advanced promotions, and is ranked higher on BoardGameGeek. So why is it that we never really hear much about it?
Shogi is complicated. Shogi is really hard. I'm also absolutely terrible at it. But that's just me. There's plenty of folks who are actually good. More to the point, though, Shogi has rules and concepts very similar to Western-style Chess; in the end you're trying to capture your opponent's king in checkmate, and individual pieces have specific movement rules, most of which will be recognizable to Chess players. There's a much deeper pool of strategic depth in Shogi, however. Between pieces being able to get promoted to more advanced versions to using your opponent's captured pieces against them.
So why don't we hear much about Shogi in the board gaming community? It's ranked higher than chess in BGG's abstract games, is easy to get, and has been around since the same medieval era, but only has ~1/20th of the ratings. Is it the fact that so much of the world was conquered by England/Spain/Portugal, rather than Japan, so Chess as most people know it spread farther? Is it due to the relative difficulty of differentiating the pieces for non-native readers? Or something else? Let me know in the comments!
If you'd like to give it a whirl, you can play some Shogi here:
https://lishogi.org/
https://japanesechess.org/
https://play.mogproject.com/
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