Hasami shogi

Hasami shogi (はさみ将棋 "hasami shōgi", sandwiching chess) is a variant of shogi (Japanese chess).

Rules of the game

Objective

The objective of the game is to capture five or eight (as agreed upon before the game) of your opponent’s pieces.

Game equipment

Two players, Black and White (or 先手 "sente" and 後手 "gote"), play on a board ruled into a grid of 9 "ranks" (rows) by 9 "files" (columns). The squares are undifferentiated by marking or color.

Each player has a set of 9 wedge-shaped pieces or pawns (foot soldiers).

Each pawn has its name in the form of two Japanese characters marked on its face (歩兵). On the reverse side of each pawn is the abbreviated character for tokin (と), often in a different color (e.g., red instead of black). Black plays with pawns and White plays with tokins.

Setup

Each side places his or her pieces in the nearest rank, one piece per file.

Game play

The players alternate making a move, with Black moving first. (The traditional terms 'black' and 'white' are used to differentiate the sides during discussion of the game, but are no longer literally descriptive.) A move consists of moving a piece onto an empty square of the board.

Movement and capture

Each piece moves as a rook in chess, that is, any number of empty squares along a straight line in any orthogonal direction, limited only by the edge of the board. If a friendly piece intervenes, the moving piece is limited to a distance that stops short of the intervening piece; if the friendly piece is adjacent, it cannot move in that direction at all. If one of the opponent’s pieces lie between a pair of the player’s pieces (horizontally or vertically), then the opponent’s piece is captured and removed from the board. Multiple pieces may be captured if all of the squares between the attacking player's pieces are occupied by the opponent's pieces. This is called a custodian capture. If a piece is moved between two of the opponent's pieces, it is not captured.

Dai hasami shogi

Dai hasami shogi is a variant of hasami shogi. It is the same as hasami shogi except that each player starts the game with 18 pieces occupying the two nearest ranks. Because most shogi sets only have 18 pawns total, this game is usually played with black and white Go stones.

A similar game is Mak-yek played in Siam (and Malaysia under the name Apit-sodok) with the same goal, on an 8x8 board, but the 16 stones of each player are placed on the first and third row. The moves are the same, but the capture is custodian and also by intervention. Intervention capture is the opposite of custodian. If a stone moves between two enemy stones, it captures both stones.

There is a hexagonal variant for Hasami Shogi, called Take invented in 1984 by Mike Woods. Curiously, there is an old Roman game, called Latrunculi seemly very similar to Hasami Shogi, but the exact rules are not known.

See also

* Shogi variant
* Whale shogi
* Hand shogi
* Annan shogi
* Unashogi
* Ko shogi

External links

* [http://www.shogi.net/shogi.html Shogi Net]
* [http://www.chessvariants.org/shogi.html Shogi: Japanese Chess]
* [http://www.chessvariants.com/shogivariants.dir/hasami.html chessvariants.com / hasami shogi]
* [http://www.di.fc.ul.pt/~jpn/gv/hasami.htm Dai hasami shogi]