Check out Modern Chess, our featured variant for January, 2025.

Enter Your Reply

The Comment You're Replying To
H. G. Muller wrote on Tue, Feb 27, 2024 04:22 PM UTC in reply to A. M. DeWitt from 03:47 PM:

In theory they would be the same, but Shogi uses the drop rule, which by its nature necessitates a way to distinguish pieces that is not dependent on color.

I did mention this as "an inconvenient necessity due to physical limitations in over-the-board play". And it is not entirely true; it is the combination of promotion and the drop rule that requires this. Otherwise you could have used different color on the backside. As this newly discovered 'South-African Chess' (Oatlali) does. (They replaced promotion by zone-dependent moving there.)

Personally I think it would have been better (in the sense that the player handling the pieces would play stronger) to flip pieces with differently colored sides on capture, and reorient them on promotion.


Edit Form

Comment on the page Play Chess Variants with Jocly

Conduct Guidelines
This is a Chess variants website, not a general forum.
Please limit your comments to Chess variants or the operation of this site.
Keep this website a safe space for Chess variant hobbyists of all stripes.
Because we want people to feel comfortable here no matter what their political or religious beliefs might be, we ask you to avoid discussing politics, religion, or other controversial subjects here. No matter how passionately you feel about any of these subjects, just take it someplace else.
Avoid Inflammatory Comments
If you are feeling anger, keep it to yourself until you calm down. Avoid insulting, blaming, or attacking someone you are angry with. Focus criticisms on ideas rather than people, and understand that criticisms of your ideas are not personal attacks and do not justify an inflammatory response.
Quick Markdown Guide

By default, new comments may be entered as Markdown, simple markup syntax designed to be readable and not look like markup. Comments stored as Markdown will be converted to HTML by Parsedown before displaying them. This follows the Github Flavored Markdown Spec with support for Markdown Extra. For a good overview of Markdown in general, check out the Markdown Guide. Here is a quick comparison of some commonly used Markdown with the rendered result:

Top level header: <H1>

Block quote

Second paragraph in block quote

First Paragraph of response. Italics, bold, and bold italics.

Second Paragraph after blank line. Here is some HTML code mixed in with the Markdown, and here is the same <U>HTML code</U> enclosed by backticks.

Secondary Header: <H2>

  • Unordered list item
  • Second unordered list item
  • New unordered list
    • Nested list item

Third Level header <H3>

  1. An ordered list item.
  2. A second ordered list item with the same number.
  3. A third ordered list item.
Here is some preformatted text.
  This line begins with some indentation.
    This begins with even more indentation.
And this line has no indentation.

Alt text for a graphic image

A definition list
A list of terms, each with one or more definitions following it.
An HTML construct using the tags <DL>, <DT> and <DD>.
A term
Its definition after a colon.
A second definition.
A third definition.
Another term following a blank line
The definition of that term.