Shinogi

Pieces

The table below shows the promotion rules and movement patterns of pieces 

Rules

Outside of the pieces, rules are mostly the same as in Shogi.

While shogi pawns cannot be doubled, or dropped to checkmate the opposing King, regular pawns are allowed to do both. Despite having the same moves, the Dragon Horse and Fox are different pieces. The Dragon Horse cannot promote to a Ninja, and will demote to a bishop when captured, unlike the Fox which cannot demote to a Bishop when captured.

Pawns will also be affected by the immobility rule, meaning that a pawn can never be dropped on the last rank, and a pawn must promote when moving to the final rank. 

Since the game itself takes place on the shogi board, most of the rules from Shinobi+ are dropped, meaning that both sides are allowed to drop at any spot on the board, and there is also no campmate rule. 

Due to the shogi environment, pawns are not able to double step in their initial move, meaning there is also no en passant.

Notes

Shogi was the one regional variant of chess that truely managed to capture my interest. It was something I would dig quite deep to find content about. Alongside variants of orthodox chess, I also tried putting together and testing some variants of shogi.

You may notice that the Fox sits on the left side of the board with all of the Shogi pieces in the starting position. This is because I decided that it would make sense to have the most valuable pieces on the second row, which would be the fox and the rook, instead of the bishop and rook. I've tried many other shogi variants, but they usually suffered from having too many pieces on the board. This version has the same amount as Shogi, while also holding a hefty amount of different pieces. I originally liked the idea of using extremely weak pieces, like the stone and iron general which can only move forward, however, doing this slowed down the early game by so much, it made simulating the game become a very mindnumbing experience. On the other hand, the piece set obtained from shinobi+ seems to have a decent balance with the pieces already on the shogi board. 

When notating this game, you can use letter 'O' to notate pawn moves, or you can use the chess way of only writing the square that the pawn is on. Either way, you must use the letter notation in order to display a pawn being dropped. At the start of the game, the piece in front of a king is a shogi pawn, and not a chess pawn. Why is this? It's because originally, to solve the uneven board width, I considered having a mix of the shogi pawn and regular pawn, but in the end, idea did not feel like it would go well. Instead I decided the shogi pawn, since the king is the shogi king from the shogi army, and would probably prefer a shogi pawn as his front guard.

The term 軍 for captain actually has a meaning closer to army than general or captain. The term 将軍 may do, however, it may seem too high of a title for this piece. 軍隊 could also work as an alternative, however it seemed to stray too far from the 'captain' title.

For the fox's full name, I considered 霊狐 (spirit fox) as it avoids overlap with the treacherous fox 隠狐 from Taikyoku Shogi. The other names are 忍者 for the ninja, 僧侶 for the monk, and 兵士 for the pawn.

Due to the increased average mobility of the pieces, the games may be shorter on average than for regular shogi. Personally, I like this as shogi tends to take very long to finish a single game. 

Similar to the silver and sometimes the knight, there are many situations where one would prefer to keep the fox in its unpromoted form when reaching the promotion zone.

Last revised by W ishere.