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Hey, Gary, thanks for your response. What if I made flat round disks that
had the same [western style] piece icon on each side, but in opposite
colors. This would allow us to play drop games by turning the pieces over
when captured. You would need at least 10 pawn disks for each side, giving
20 double-sided pawn disks. You would need more piece disks than that,
however. You would need the 8 FIDE pieces per side, plus the RN and BN
pieces, plus 2 cannons, plus a pair of guards, plus a pair of elephants
for shatranj, plus 2 towers, plus ... until you had enough pieces to play
a large number of variants. What would this number be? How small could it
be? And what about promoted pieces? Shogi, allowing multiple gold generals
on the board, could be difficult.

Let's look at this another way. How many pieces are used in one game? If
a 10x10 board is 60% full, that means 30 pieces/side, and 60 total
double-sided pieces. Deduct 10 pawns, leaving 20 pieces. FIDE uses 8, and
the Capa/Carrera use 2 more, leaving 10 pieces. A pair each of towers,
guards, and elephants will cover lances, gold, and silver, as well as
shatranj, makruk and similar games. This takes 6 pieces, leaving 4
available from our hypothetical 30. Now, we already have 4 singleton
pieces, and 6 pairs of pieces [but no promoted pieces for shogi, as we're
looking at double-sided pieces with a white piece on one side and the same
piece in black on the other]. This does, however, give us 10 different
pieces plus the pawn in our set, which currently has 26 disks in it. Is
this actually enough to play almost everything, except shogi? We could add
2 singleton pieces that would double as amazon/dragon bishop and
emperor/dragon rook, bringing our total pieces/side to 28, and maybe use a
go stone placed on a piece to represent promoted shogi pieces. Then, to
bring the total to 30, I'd be inclined to throw in 2 more guard pieces,
making 4 of them. This would give us 10 identical pawns, one set of 4
pieces, five pairs of pieces, and 6 singleton pieces. Would guard pieces
do for promoted-to-gold shogi pieces?