The hand and the drop

Try it on the board

The hand (komadai)

Every piece you capture goes into your hand. On any turn of yours, instead of moving a piece on the board, you may drop one from your hand onto an empty square - and that uses up the whole move.

The dropped piece arrives as yours and unpromoted, even if it was promoted when you captured it. It can land on almost any empty square, including deep inside enemy territory.

The four restrictions

There are few of them and they all make sense: a drop cannot capture, cannot promote, cannot leave a piece with no move, and cannot double a pawn on a file.

There is a fifth restriction that applies only to the pawn and only when it mates - uchifuzume. It gets its own place in lesson 7.

• Empty squares only. A drop never captures - though it may give check.
• Always unpromoted, whatever the piece was when you took it.
• Never onto a square where the piece would have no move: pawn and lance on the last rank, knight on the last two.
• Nifu (二歩): no two unpromoted pawns of yours on the same file. Promoted pawns do not count.

Why this changes the whole game

Since nothing leaves the game, the material on the board is constant and an attack never runs out of ammunition. Trading pieces does not simplify the position: it just moves pieces into the hands, where they are more dangerous, because they can reappear anywhere.

That is why shogi has no endgame in the chess sense, and why an apparently lost game turns around with a single drop next to the enemy king.