Talk:Sho shogi

message: Looking good! kwami 20:21, 11 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Early talk

message: In fact, according to Masukawa's 2004 paper, modern shogi was still called sho shogi when chu shogi had not yet been driven to near-extinction. (Hodges may be right that chu shogi never died, but only in the sense that there were always players. Right now there are surely people who know the rules of tenjiku – I know I do – but the game never really lived in the sense that shogi does now and that chu shogi once did.) Double sharp (talk) 08:35, 7 March 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  "immediate predecessor" 

message: I have to wonder about this, since it is uncited, and because I don't see why sho shogi with drops should be a problem if you are not allowed to drop a royal or potential royal (which is actually exactly how it works even today in standard shogi), as suggested here. Double sharp (talk) 05:13, 15 August 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: I am still digesting this very interesting reference (my French is a bit rusty), and have not gotten to the part dealing with your remark above. But I did already encounter something very significant: they quote a description of Heian Shogi, and it seems the last sentence of it does describe a baring rule. Since Heian Shogi obviously must have been derived from Chaturanga/Shatranj somehow, it is of course not unlikely it could have inherited this rule. Not that it really seems needed in this game: Gold has mating potential on 9x9, and everything promotes to Gold. It would still change the case of pieces cut off from their King and attacked from behind, though. This puts the remark about the 'unpromoted Gold against bare King' in the 1703 Chu-Shogi description in a somewhat different light. H.G.Muller (talk) 07:40, 28 August 2017 (UTC)
replies: text:  Thanks for that observation! (For reference, the sentence is "敵玉一将則為勝" in the Nichūreki.) What is even more interesting is that checkmate has apparently not been listed at all as a game-ending condition; only king baring. Is that significant, I wonder? It may well mean that king baring was considered a more fundamental form of victory than checkmate in those times. This seems to make it more likely that you can win in general by king baring in Chu, but once again we have a frustrating lack of confirmation. Double sharp (talk) 10:48, 28 August 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: Well, it only makes sense to talk about King baring if there is some guarantee that the King will be that last-surviving piece. So I assume loss of the King would mean loss of the game. I agree it is strange that this is not mentioned when existence and popularity of other chess variants do not make this obvious. H.G.Muller (talk) 11:29, 28 August 2017 (UTC)
replies: text:  One very singular point about the shogi branch of the chess family is that unlike Shatranj (and just about all its other descendants), it appears that there was no notion of check for a long while. (Which must have been lost somewhere along the line, because Makruk has it, and it is clearly on the path to Shogi with its large promotion zone and pawns on the third rank.) If you left your king under attack, your opponent just took it, and you lost. So king baring seems to have been on a par with king taking as a victory condition, rather than checkmate. (And of course this state of affairs would make the idea of having a second king which also had to be taken seem very natural, unlike how weird it feels in FIDE chess!) Perhaps this was changing in the heyday of Chu, as Fairbairn mention in his 1980 article: "The old texts also gave a fatuous rule that if a player overlooks a check on his King in the first 20 moves (10 moves Western style) he loses." Double sharp (talk) 12:30, 28 August 2017 (UTC)

text: P.S. Oh, and my initial remark is not part of the main article, but it is raised in the comments to it. Double sharp (talk) 10:59, 28 August 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Timing of the elimination of drops 

message: I find it somewhat unexpected that the promotion rule as given (allowing moves out of the zone as well) are the same as those for modern shogi rather than those of chu shogi. Double sharp (talk) 04:21, 1 April 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Promotion rule