For chess players · Lesson 1 of 7
The board, and the rules that are not there
The first thing to do is subtract. Several rules you have carried since you learned chess simply do not exist in shogi, and expecting them is how the first few games go wrong.
Try it on the board
One more file, one more rank, no colours
The board is 9x9 - 81 squares, all identical. There is no light-square bishop and no dark-square bishop, because there are no light and dark squares; the single bishop each side owns reaches every square on the board given time.
The pieces have no colour either. They are flat wedge-shaped tiles with kanji on them, and what tells you whose piece a tile is, is which way its point faces: yours point away from you. This matters more than it sounds, and it is the direct consequence of the drop rule in lesson 5.
Coordinates that run right to left
Files are numbered 1 to 9 from right to left; ranks are lettered a to i from the top down. A square is named file first: 7g. So 1a is the top-right corner where you would expect h8, and 9i is the bottom-left.
It reads backwards for about ten minutes. The exercise above is there to get that over with, because every kifu, book and game on this site is written in it.
- No castling. The king is made safe by walking generals over to him across three or four moves - a "castle", built by hand.
- No queen. Nothing on the board starts stronger than a rook.
- No double first step for pawns, and no en passant to answer it with.
- No stalemate draw: a player with no legal move loses.
- No colour-bound anything, since no square has a colour.
What you can stop looking for
Five rules you know are absent. Their absence is not a simplification - each one is replaced by something that costs more moves and gives you more choices.
The one to feel in your first game is stalemate. In chess it is your escape hatch when you are lost; here a player with no legal move simply loses, so there is no swindling your way to half a point.