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-The opening setup for shogi is as follows: -
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- 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 -+--------------------------------------------+ -| wL | wN | wS | wG | wK | wG | wS | wN | wL | a -+--------------------------------------------+ -| | wR | | | | | | wB | | b -+--------------------------------------------+ -| wP | wP | wP | wP | wP | wP | wP | wP | wP | c -+--------------------------------------------+ -| | | | | | | | | | d -+--------------------------------------------+ -| | | | | | | | | | e -+--------------------------------------------+ -| | | | | | | | | | f -+--------------------------------------------+ -| bP | bP | bP | bP | bP | bP | bP | bP | bP | g -+--------------------------------------------+ -| | bB | | | | | | bR | | h -+--------------------------------------------+ -| bL | bN | bS | bG | bK | bG | bS | bN | bL | i -+--------------------------------------------+ -+Shogi is a two-person abstract strategy board game with full information +(i.e. all pieces and moves are visible to both players at all times). +It is in the chess family, being descended from the same ancestral game +as international chess: the Indian game of Chaturanga. The two players +are referred to as "Black" and "White", with Black moving first +(unlike in international chess, where White moves first), and with +movement alternating between the two players. Note that "Black" and +"White" are just names; the pieces are not colored. Instead, they are +flat, wedge-shaped pieces which point towards the opponent. The +identity of a given piece is indicated by two Japanese Kanji characters +on each piece. In fact, only the top character is needed to identify +the piece and thus only the top character is used in shogi diagrams. I +will use alphabetical equivalents in the diagrams here; to see what the +Kanji characters look like, start up xshogi (see section 4. xshogi) and compare +the starting setup there with the starting setup in this file +(see section 2.1.2 The opening setup). +
+The object of the game is to capture the opponent's King. The board is +a grid of 9x9 uncolored squares, and pieces are placed on the squares. +Each player begins with 20 pieces, described in the next section. +Capture is by displacement, as in international chess. +
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+ 2.1.1 The moves of the pieces + 2.1.2 The opening setup + 2.1.3 Promotion of pieces + 2.1.4 Drops + 2.1.5 Winning the game + 2.1.6 Draws + 2.1.7 Handicaps + 2.1.8 Notes for chess players
-Here, "b" stands for "black" and "w" stands for "white", so -that, for instance, "bL" means "black lance". The numbers above the -files and the letters to the right of the ranks represent the most -common notation system used for shogi by westerners (the Japanese also -use Arabic numerals for the files but use Japanese numerals for the -ranks). - -
| [ < ] | +[ > ] | +[ << ] | +[ Up ] | +[ >> ] | +[Top] | +[Contents] | +[Index] | +[ ? ] | +