Shogi And Xiangqi Pieces And Characters - Chess Forums

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Sort: evert823 Jan 5, 2016 0 #1

I'm looking at Shogi and Xiangqi but it will take me a year to recognize the pieces by their Japanese / Chinese characters

FM nobodyreally Jan 5, 2016 0 #2

No, it won't.

I played both extensively long ago. And I remember getting used to them within a couple of days.

HGMuller Jan 6, 2016 0 #3

You will learn quickly to recognize them from some very small details that distinguish them from each other. Even for Chu Shogi, which has 28 different pieces, at some point I could recognize them, even though I never made any conscious effort to learn them.

That being said, they will of course always remain a handicap when using them for playing, which will suppress your performance by at least 300 Elo. The number of Chu Shogi players that lose games by allowing their King to be captured (usually exposing it by moving diagonally pinned pieces) is staggering. I used to watch the games with a mnemonic piece representation, and although I never played the game myself I could always see it coming instantly when they were going to do it.

Especially the traditional Shogi representation sucks, because you have to identify enemy pieces by shape/orientation. Which means you cannot use some of the highly parallelized optical centers in your brain to recognize them, which you would if they had different colors.

Win/XBoard uses a Chess-style pictogram representation for these games by default (although the piece images, like almost everything else, are of course user configurable, and dedicated oriental representations are also available).

FM nobodyreally Jan 6, 2016 0 #4

Maybe you can find a 'western' set like the second one. But really, it only took a few games to get used to the 8 different pieces.

HGMuller Jan 6, 2016 0 #5

On a computer display I like them better like this

Or for Chu Shogi:

For over-the-board play you will always have the problem in Shogi that the pieces will have to be usable for both sides, and that flipping them isn't an option, as the the backside is already in use for the promoted versions. That pretty much destroys most possibilities to design something reasonable. You don't really want to play with extra pieces that you could swap out when the need arises, because that is too confusing for what you have in hand.

Stacking pieces on or under a promotion indicator could be acceptable, though, as promoted pieces never get in hand. E.g. you could have a kind of draughts chips with pictograms for the piece on both sides (one white, the other black), possibly with varying thickness to stress the difference between the pieces, and have special, semi-transparent 'promotion chips' you could lay on top of them, and throw into a pool when they are captured.

bangersnmash70 Jan 13, 2016 0 #6

Er, it took me about one day to recognise the Japanese and Chinese symbols. I  don't understand the problem, you don't have to actually learn the language, just recogise the shape. Western knights have two ears, shogi golds look like they're wearing a pointed hat, western queens have a tiara, xiangqi counsellors looke like a childs drawing of an airplane, shogi pawns are the smallest pieces, the general is the largest, xiangi cannon look a bit like a seahorse.etc. Oh and the one that still looks like a complete unidentifiable mess to me must be the shogi silver!

 

Don't get intimidated by the symbols, they're not really that difficult after a while.

evert823 Feb 16, 2016 0 #7

I found some nice chess-style Xiangqi pieces:

http://scrybqj.com/wood_xiangqi_pieces/

 

Otherwise the available superchess piece sets can do the job:

http://www.superchess.nl/

evert823 Feb 28, 2016 0 #8

My idea of playing Shogi OTB: lego for Gold, Silver, Lance, and I'll put promoted pieces on draughts pieces - thus following the draughts convention :)

HGMuller Feb 28, 2016 0 #9

One of the problems with Shogi is that the pieces have to change side. So you would need a double set, and some strict procedure to prevent that the spare pieces accidentally (or not so accidentally) find their way into the hands.

I once developed a method to do this for mini-Shogi, where a normal Chess set already contains double the number of pieces you start with, as in mini-Shogi you start with just one of each piece type (and no Knights or Lances). The idea was that a Gold should look as a Pawn on 2 Draughts chips, and a Silver as a Pawn on one (glued to them). By slipping one extra Draughts chip below the Silver, and two below the Pawn on promotion, they would then look like Golds. By taking the opposite color for the Draughts chips that are slipped underneath, you can still see the difference between G, +S and +P.

evert823 Feb 28, 2016 0 #10

I think I can borrow some more lego from my child :)

and buy one more normal chess set is no big deal

evert823 Feb 28, 2016 0 #11

While playing through a Japanese game between strong players it occurred to me that often the same piece is exchanged, and as a consequence the right color becomes available for the hand before you need to bring in your duplicate set.

evert823 Mar 15, 2016 0 #12

And for Xiangqi notation, one could have used one simple coordinate system, but each color has its own and it takes a certain H.T. Lau 4 pages (!) to explain it all ... 

HGMuller Mar 15, 2016 0 #13

I like my own Cannon design better, though:

(This is truly weird: In the edit box where I type my message the inserted image show up, but not in the post itself. ANyway, the link is http://home.hccnet.nl/h.g.muller/canvet4.JPG .)

HGMuller Aug 23, 2016 0 #14

I just constructed a Chu Shogi set forover-the-board play. In Chu Shogi there are no drops, so it is no problem to give both players a different color, white and black. (Which is much easier to recognize for the human eye than the orientation of pentagons.) So I just used three sets of draughts chips (2 boxes of 35mm disks for the pieces, and a box of slightly smaller 32mm disks for the Pawns, and glued the images of the pieces on top of those. For this I cut out the mnemonic piece shapes from stickers.

The 32 large chips (8 stacks of 4) and 14 small chips (3 stacks of 5, with one spare Pawn) of one color conveniently fit into the boxes in which the big chips came. This set allows a novice to play Chu with only 5 min of introduction (although during the game he would probably have to peek on the back of the pieces to see how they promote). Basically only the Lion, Eagle and Falcon double-moves have to be explained, plus general rules on promotion. The rest is self-evident.

ArgoNavis Aug 23, 2016 0 #15

Asians will do us (and themselves) a favour the day they stop using their unreasonable signs and adopt Latin alphabet

HGMuller Aug 23, 2016 0 #16

[Edit] The text below was my response to a posting apparently deleted by moderation, addressing the desirability of using kanji versus the latin alphabet on chess pieces to identify them. [End of edit]

I don't think that is really the problem. I also would not be very happy to have the names of the pieces printed on them in (say) Finnish, although they do use the Latin alphabet. In fact even names printed on pieces in a language I can read seems a pretty bad idea. For one, reading is a slow (and thus poor) way to recognize something, because it is done by higher optical brain centra. Finding a particular word in a list of 100 takes 10 times as long a finding it in a list of 10. But finding a red dot in a field of a million white dots takes equally long as finding it in a field of 100 white dots, because it can be done in lower brain centra that process info in parallel. The same for finding a square in a field of circles. Recognizing shapes andcolors are much more fundamental than recognizing words.

In relation to shapes, these large Shogi variants still have a problem if the shapes do not imply the move. I once conducteda poll under Chess players which representation of the Chu Shogi board would be less intimidating: mnemonic shapes or the pictograms below

Surprisingly they preferred the pictograms. Of course these make it rather easy to recognize that a piece is a Leopard, a Unicorn or a Lion. But that knowledge does not help you at all fo rknowing how you canmove that piece. You would still have to learn that. Which becomes a problem if there are many dozens of piece types...

HGMuller Aug 24, 2016 0 #17

It is questionable whether the 25x25 game (Tai Shogi) was ever really played, or whether it was just intended as decoration. It seems a game would last for days.

As to Chu Shogi: there exists a Japanese Chu Shogi Society. I don't know how many members they have. But I am pretty sure it is at least two orders of magnitude less than the number of players for 'standard' Shogi. Having no drops Chu Shogi is much more Chess-like than the modern 9x9 game. They definitely manufacture and sell pieces for it in Japan. George Hodges' widow still sells Shogi equipment that you can order by e-mail ( george.hodges AT talk21 DOT com). I still have the 2009/2010 price list, and that lists a set of Chu Shogi pieces (plastic tiles printed with black and red kanji) for 80 euros, and a 12x12 vinyl board for 40 euros.

Chu Shogi is a very good game; the major disadvantage is that games take many more moves than a typical Chess game. At blitz speed a game would take about an hour (30 min/side).

HGMuller Aug 24, 2016 0 #18

That is a bad idea for several reasons. For one, there are not nearly enough Musketeer-Chess pieces. Chu Shogi needs 36 different piece types, 28 if you ignore the diffrence between promotable and unpromotable pieces that move the same. I considered using the SuperChess pieces, of which there would be enough. But it still is awkward, for the same reason the pictograms are awkward in 2d: you would have to learn to recognize the shapes, and remember the moves for each shape. Then there is the problem of promoted piece: you would want pieces that move like a Rook to look like a Rook,etc. But a Gold promotes to Rook, and a Gold,or a Gold on a pedestal looks nothing like a Rook. That means you would need duplicate Rooks (and many other pieces) for promotion substitutions. And then you would still need some method to distinguish the promotable Rook from the promoted Gold, e.g. by pedestals. This would make the set unmanagebly large.

Draughts chips, OTOH,  are flippable, so that you can fix the mnemonic for the promoted piece on the back.

Some wooden Superchess pieces.(Many more are available.)

EGleb Aug 25, 2016 0 #19 HGMuller wrote:

Some wooden Superchess pieces.(Many more are available.)

Are they still?

The website looks pretty much dead (no news items in years) and the order form wasn't updated with payment information using IBAN.

I've looked at the pieces a couple of times, but never quite got round to buying them. They're expensive, and for my ideal mix of pieces I would need to splurge on multiple sets...

evert823 Aug 25, 2016 0 #20 EGleb wrote: HGMuller wrote:

Some wooden Superchess pieces.(Many more are available.)

Are they still?

The website looks pretty much dead (no news items in years) and the order form wasn't updated with payment information using IBAN.

I've looked at the pieces a couple of times, but never quite got round to buying them. They're expensive, and for my ideal mix of pieces I would need to splurge on multiple sets...

The Dutch site is updated every now and then when a tournament has taken place. They don't bring the English site in sync - which explains your observation.

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