Diagrammatic Shogi Pieces
If you don't know Japanese, it can be hard getting used to the pieces
Zillions of Games normally uses for Shogi. This set should help. In a
review I read of the book Meta Chess, it mentioned that the
author favors replacing Chess pieces with Shogi style pieces which
have piece movement diagrams on them. I have made a set like this for
Shogi. The diagrams consist of dots and lines. Each piece has a black
or red dot in its center. Black is for unpromoted pieces, and red is
for promoted pieces. This dot indicates the piece's starting position
in the diagram displayed on it. Blue and green dots are used to
indicate which of the adjacent squares a piece can move to. Blue and
green lines are used to indicate that a piece can move any number of
squares in the direction it points away from the center. Blue is used
for orthogonal movement and green for diagonal movement. The Knight
diagram is a bit different. It has two green dots at the upper tips of
a Y. The Y indicates how the Knight jumps. Since the King is a royal
piece, and the object of the game is to checkmate or capture it, it is
also identified with an image. Its movement diagram appears inside a
circle with a cross on top.
These pieces are all original designs by Fergus Duniho. Any user of
Zillions is free to use these images for playing Shogi with Zillions
of Games. For other uses, please contact me through Duniho@Fergus.com.
The images have the same names as the originals but are initially in a
separate directory. This will let you try them out without replacing
the old images. If you decide that you like them better than the
Japanese character images, you may copy them over the original images
in the images/Shogi directory.
Fergus Duniho
http://Duniho.Fergus.com
These files require the Windows program "Zillions of Games." Zillions
of Games allows you to play any number of games against the computer
or over the Internet. Zillions of Games can be purchased online. For
more information: