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🕸Fergus Duniho wrote on Wed, Feb 28, 2024 05:49 PM UTC in reply to H. G. Muller from 03:41 PM:

Yeah, sure. Who needs the reminder of pieces? You might as well play blindfold...

That's just a false equivalency, as I was saying nothing of the sort.

Recognizing the piece type is of course at least as important as recognizing the color.

I agree that recognizing piece type is at least as important as recognizing sides. But I want to emphasize here that it recognizing sides that is important, and recognizing sides by color is just one way it can be done. In a regular Shogi game, recognizing sides by orientation is not difficult for me.

Coloring the pieces does not have any effect on the ability to recognize the type symbol, though.

Coloring the pieces of each side differently can limit the use of color in distinguishing between types of pieces. The Alfaerie set, for example, does not use color at all in distinguishing between promoted and unpromoted pieces, whereas the Motif set does. The western set for Jocly makes some use of color in distinguishing promoted from unpromoted pieces, but it doesn't make promoted pieces stand out as much as the Motif set does.

So it isn't really relevant that you also have to recognize the type; there is no need to degrade the side recognition for improving the type recognition.

My point is that multiple factors go into the suitability of one set over another, and it would be wrong to say that one set is unequivocally superior on the basis of one metric.

And it will probably also not be contested by anyone here that for westerners kanji are doing a poorer job at that than pictograms, as far as type recognitiion is concerned.

I believe there are westerners who claim to have no problem with Kanji, but you and I are agreed on preferring pictographic pieces.

From whatching Chu-Shogi games by experience Chu-Shogi players, I noticed that these frequently blunder in an elementary way (such as overlooking a discovered attack on a high-value piece), and that I, as a non-player, could almost always predict when they were going to blunder.

I don't play Chu Shogi at all, but this is the kind of error I'm more prone to when playing Shogi with Kanji pieces.

As to the auhenticity... Seems to me you pretty much threw that out of the window when you abandoned the kanji. No Japanese would ever agree that there is any authenticity in these pieces.

It's not for you to say what Japanese people would think, and it is not for Japanese people to judge whether one of my experiences feels more authentic than the other.

In fact I noticed they tend to even deny that you are playing Shogi, when you use non-kanji pieces.

I have not had any communication with them on this, but it would be as objectively false as saying that you are not playing Chess if you don't use Staunton pieces.


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