![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Because pieces keep coming back to life, the board stays mostly full of pieces throughout the game endgames are often an exciting race to checkmate as both sides’ defences break down and they start launching brutal attacks back and forth. Drops make Shogi a very dynamic and aggressive game, and drastically change the feel in comparison to Chess. At any time, a player may ‘drop’ a captured piece to any empty square on the board in lieu of a normal move (with some restrictions). Pieces that are captured are truly captured - they become the property of the capturing side, and are placed on the side of the board under their control.For those who aren’t familiar with Shogi, it has several major differences from Western Chess: Modern Shogiįirst and foremost in Ai Ai’s new Shogi assortment we have modern Shogi, played on a 9×9 board with ten different types of pieces. With these three options in place, these games should be accessible to a larger audience. In the end we went with three sets of pieces: traditional pieces using a single kanji character for each piece mnemonic pieces that combine the kanji with mnemonic diagrams designed by HG Muller and diagrammatic pieces, where each piece is a simple square shape with a diagram of the piece’s move on it. On top of that there was lots of design work to do, because we wanted to offer multiple piece graphic sets to help people who have trouble learning Japanese kanji characters. Then we got started on Shogi, which turned into quite a project - Stephen had to cope with some incredible coding challenges throughout, from implementing drops to Chu Shogi’s complex Lion-trading rules. I had been embarking on a project to playtest some of the more promising large Chess variants - on 10×8 boards and larger - and so Stephen added a huge array of new piece types into Ai Ai so that these variants could be added in (more on these games in a future post). ![]() Last year Stephen added a general Chess-playing engine to Ai Ai, and has been steadily adding lots of great Chess variants to it such as Capablanca Chess, Chess960 and Grand Chess. UPDATE (12 April): Stephen has updated Ai Ai to fix a bug with Chu Shogi’s Lion, and we also added several new variants including Goro Goro Shogi, Goro Goro Plus and Wa Shogi! Grab the updated version here.įor the last few weeks, Stephen Tavener and I have been collaborating to bring Shogi and several of its variants to his amazing Ai Ai software, a general game-playing program that lets you play hundreds of abstract strategy games against strong AI, or against human opposition online. ![]()
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