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Good to see Hanten Shogi and its little brother revived! Looking forward to playing on Game Courier sometime :)

If I may make a suggestion, I remember in the previous version the switchback pieces had blue rather than red on the promoted side, which I thought was visually helpful. Any chance of that coming back?

Thinking ahead, perhaps there's an opportunity for an even wilder follow-up to Hanten Shogi -- a large Shogi with Kyoto-Shogi-style switchbacks after every move, including non-captures :)

I will have the blue coloration come back sometime, although I will probably reverse the colors to save me time if I need to update any graphics.

Kyoto Shogi style switchbacks could be interesting. But there is a problem: the instant a Pawn or Drunk Elephant moves, it would be forced to promote, which boosts defense early on and makes the game less interesting in my opinion. Of course, this can be easily solved by including exceptions to this rule for those pieces, and providing some sort of visual cue to match. But to me, the condition that promotion/demotion only happens on captures makes more sense, as you would need less visual cues for it.

You can find the preset for Hanten shogi in the Computer Play section of the notes.

I have now added blue versions for the Prince and Tokin. For their Mnemonic versions, the inside of the cross/dot is hollow.

Kyoto Shogi style switchbacks could be interesting. But there is a problem: the instant a Pawn or Drunk Elephant moves, it would be forced to promote, which boosts defense early on and makes the game less interesting in my opinion. Of course, this can be easily solved by including exceptions to this rule for those pieces, and providing some sort of visual cue to match. But to me, the condition that promotion/demotion only happens on captures makes more sense, as you would need less visual cues for it.

Yes, definitely some of the promotions would need to be changed to make Kyoto-Suzumu playable. It could be interesting to follow Kyoto Shogi's lead, and change the promoted sides of the Pawns/Drunk Elephants so that the pieces swap between long-range and short-range roles, rather than being defensively strong in both (and it's probably sensible to scrap the promotion to Prince entirely).

Probably most of the promotions/demotions would benefit from changes, really; I agree with you that having no exceptions to the rule would be preferable, so the whole thing would have to be carefully tested. I'd be inclined to have most pieces promote/demote to pieces that don't share most of their moves, so that players have to cope with each piece having two distinct personalities from move to move. In any case, these sorts of questions are what intrigues me about the idea -- it'd be quite a design challenge :)

Thanks for reintroducing the two different colours to Hanten! That's a helpful little mnemonic for players new to the switchback-capture idea.