Shogi rules: how to play Japanese chess
Everything you need to sit down and play your first game of shogi: the board, the twenty pieces and how they move, promotion, the drop rule that makes shogi unlike any other chess variant, and the handful of special rules that decide games. No prior knowledge assumed.
Two ways in - pick yours
The course: nine lessons
The pieces and how they move
The board and the initial setup
Shogi is played on a 9x9 board of 81 squares, all the same colour - there are no light and dark squares. Files are numbered 1 to 9 from right to left, ranks are lettered a to i from the top, so the bottom-right corner is 1i and the top-left corner is 9a. The player who moves first is Sente (先手); the second player is Gote (後手).
Each side starts with twenty pieces on the three ranks nearest to them: nine pawns across the third rank, the rook and the bishop on the second rank, and the king with its two golds, two silvers, two knights and two lances filling the back rank. The pieces are flat wedge-shaped tiles and they all point at the opponent, which is how you tell whose piece is whose - there is no colour.
Promotion
The last three ranks on the opponent side of the board are the promotion zone. Any piece that moves into, inside or out of that zone may be promoted at the end of that move by flipping the tile over to its red kanji side. Promotion is optional, except that a piece which would otherwise have no legal move ever again - a pawn or lance on the last rank, a knight on either of the last two - must promote.
Rook and bishop keep their old moves and gain new ones (Dragon King 龍 and Dragon Horse 馬). Silver, knight, lance and pawn all promote into a gold general: a promoted pawn is called a tokin (と) and is one of the most useful attackers in the game. King and gold general never promote, and a promoted piece that gets captured goes back to your hand unpromoted.
Drops: the rule that makes shogi different
When you capture a piece it does not leave the game - it goes to your hand (komadai). On any later turn, instead of moving a piece on the board, you may drop a piece from your hand onto any empty square. The dropped piece becomes yours, unpromoted, and may go almost anywhere, with four restrictions.
Because nothing is ever removed from play, shogi has no endgame in the chess sense: the material on the board stays constant, attacks feed themselves with captured pieces, and a game that looks lost can turn on a single drop next to the enemy king.
- A drop may only be made onto an empty square, and it is your whole move - a drop can never capture, though it can give check.
- A dropped piece is always unpromoted, even if it was promoted when you captured it.
- You may not drop a piece where it would have no legal move: no pawn or lance on the last rank, no knight on the last two.
- Nifu (二歩): you may not drop a pawn onto a file where you already have an unpromoted pawn. Promoted pawns do not count.
Check, checkmate and how games end
A king under attack is in check (王手 ote) and the check must be answered. If there is no legal way out it is checkmate (詰み tsumi) and the game is over. There is no castling move in shogi: the king is made safe by building a castle (囲い kakoi) out of generals over several moves instead.
Games also end by resignation - the normal outcome at every level, since sitting through a mate is considered graceless - and by a few technical rules: uchifuzume (打ち歩詰め) forbids delivering checkmate with a dropped pawn; sennichite (千日手), the same position repeated four times, is a draw unless it came from perpetual check, in which case the checking side loses; and jishogi, the rare impasse where both kings walk into the enemy camp and the game is settled by counting piece points.
Reading shogi notation
A move is written as the origin square, the destination square and the piece: 7g7f is the pawn on 7g going to 7f. A capture is marked with x, a drop with an asterisk (P*4e reads as a pawn dropped on 4e), promotion with a + after the move and declining promotion with an =. Game records (kifu) written this way replay on any board, including the ones on this site.
What to learn next
Knowing the rules is not yet knowing how to play. The usual next step is one castle and one opening: build the Mino castle, learn a Swinging Rook opening behind it, and play a dozen games without changing anything. Then read the piece pages to see what each one is actually for in the middle game.
Shogi rules: common questions
Is shogi harder than chess?
The rules take about ten minutes to learn and are no harder than the chess rules - the pieces are simpler, the drop aside. What makes shogi demanding is that captured pieces come back, so the position never simplifies and the calculation stays sharp to the last move.
Why is there no queen in shogi?
Shogi has no queen. The rook and the bishop are the ranging pieces, and they only reach that level of power once promoted into the Dragon King and the Dragon Horse. The slow start is deliberate: it gives both sides time to build a castle.
Can a shogi game end in a draw?
Almost never. Because pieces are never removed from the game, only about one game in a hundred ends without a winner, through fourfold repetition (sennichite) or the impasse rule (jishogi).
What does promoting a piece mean in shogi?
Promoting means flipping a piece over to its red side when it moves into, inside or out of the last three ranks. Rook and bishop become stronger versions of themselves; silver, knight, lance and pawn all become gold generals.