Talk:Tai shogi

Sources, etc.

Hey JT,

I'm making my corrections off the Japanese article. What's your source for this? I'm just wondering where the discrepancies have crept in.

I changed "silver demon" to "silver hare" per the Japanese page, but the kanji look rather similar. "Demon" seems a more fitting name for this variant, but there you go. There is no "side chariot" in the Japanese article; instead they have a "running chariot". (It goes in all orthogonal directions.)

A lot more pieces promote - or demote, actually, since once you capture you're left with a gold. But a few become more powerful; I'll get you the movements they make in the next day or two.

I haven't verified the piece movements at all. Taishogi pieces often move differently than pieces with the same names in other variants, so I should probably do that.

I've caught one blatant naming error in the Japanese chu shogi article, so if you feel your source is correct, maybe it is!

Thanks for all the hard work! kwami 13:19, 2005 September 4 (UTC)

When a piece promotes to a "free" version of itself, that just means that it flies across the board instead of taking one step. So the cat sword steps one space diagonally, and the free cat moves like a bishop. Check out the Japanese link; they have a nice diagram, where every piece on the board is linked to its own article. The promotions vary according to the variant, so look for 泰将棋 (usually towards the bottom of the page). kwami 14:08, 2005 September 4 (UTC)

I neglected to keep track of all my sources as I should have done. My main sources for this article where: an article by Luke Merritt at Roger Hare’s website, and this article (which has its own references but the links are now broken). Luke also wrote an article on orthodox shogi and proclaimed it “incomplete” (His article on Tai shogi had no such proclamation).

“Intellectual brilliance is no guarantee against being dead wrong.” - David Fasold; later Carl Sagan on Ptolemy’s earth centered universe. --JTTyler 23:37, 5 September 2005 (UTC)

Because there are no drops, a knight cannot land on the last rank. He must stay at the second-from-last rank. JTTyler

I have found that sennichite could meen "lonely soldier" or "enduring lonelyness" which could refer to the 'bare king' rule, which dosn't exist in tai shogi. If this is correct, then my english sources where wrong(for using the word sennichite). --JTTyler

𩹄

𩹄 = 魚+曷 (U+29E44) http://www.unicode.org/cgi-bin/GetUnihanData.pl?codepoint=29E44

Thanks for both of those. kwami 22:57, 30 November 2007 (UTC)

Revisions

An anon editor just today made numerous revisions, including deleting several pieces, without ref. Since this article could so easily get garbled, I reverted. However, it did seem to be done in good faith, and could well be correct, since a lot of the info we have is suspect. Anon, could you supply your sources? Thanks. kwami 22:57, 30 November 2007 (UTC)

I've started going through them, in case Japanese wiki had changed, but in every case Anon's edits contradict it. In a few cases where we have notes, they agree with Evans' software. However, that isn't a reliable source either, and is probably less reliable than the Japanese article. kwami 00:09, 1 December 2007 (UTC)

Note: There are notes in Japanese wikipedia on sourcing problems for the deva and dark spirit which may have been overlooked because they're linked to the maka daidai diagrams and only appear at the very ends of the notes. There's also a discrepancy with the gold. kwami (talk) 21:22, 6 August 2008 (UTC)

Could someone verify the Lion Dog (Komainu) promotion in the Japanese wiki, please? I believe the Japanese article states it promotes to a Great Elephant and the English article inaccurately quotes the Japanese but I'm only using google translate so I may be incorrect. Many thanks! Shumby (talk) 18:04, 1 May 2015 (UTC)

Free Tapir vs. Free Dream-Eater

In the piece list and the movement description there is the Free Dream-Eater, but in the initial position there is the Free Tapir. Both are presumably the same piece. Since I don't read japanese, can someone clarify this issue (and unify, if necessary)? 84.165.253.220 (talk) 21:33, 8 February 2010 (UTC)

I don't know if this happened in Chinese, or in Japanese before borrowings from European languages started, but there are several cases where the names of traditional mythical animals have been extended to exotic but real animals. One of these is 'kirin' for giraffe; this is another: the baku for tapir. Since the word itself is ambiguous, we can only guess as to which is meant in this case, but my money is on the mythical creature. I've changed 'tapir' to 'dream-eater' here and in the other shogi variants that have it. kwami (talk) 04:33, 9 February 2010 (UTC)

Movement diagrams

Why are there no movement diagrams like the other variants? OosakaNoOusama (talk) 05:54, 21 April 2013 (UTC)

Do you want to take the time to make them? I don't! Also, several pieces may be wrong, as they disagree with WP-ja. — kwami (talk) 06:21, 21 April 2013 (UTC)

Perhaps neither of you do, but it is an idea I have been considering for two years...anyway, I will check the pieces against the sources. (I developed a sort of suspicion for TSA rules after the lion-hawk issue came to my attention, and would much rather check the original Japanese sources. On my viewpoint on the LH, I feel rather strongly that if a piece is described as moving like another piece, that implies (strongly) that its movement is the same, not (weakly) that it can just move to the same squares. The mao and moa cannot really be said to move like a knight, can they?) Double sharp (talk) 12:49, 21 April 2013 (UTC)

I still feel kind of guilty about not doing this one, because it has been done for dai-dai and maka-dai-dai and hence most of this would be a copy-paste festival, and because it is one of the grand old trio from the Muromachi period. Maybe I'll try to get it done soon. (I'll pass on taikyoku, because that would actually require significant amounts of original work, and it is difficult to say what the original rules are. Not that this isn't true for the Muromachi trio, but then you can use your imagination to iron out inconsistencies.) Double sharp (talk) 15:29, 6 March 2016 (UTC)

Done! :D Double sharp (talk) 13:55, 3 January 2022 (UTC)

Captures by the emperor

Hi,

It is written in this article that an emperor cannot capture any piece if the opponent also has their emperor, because the latter protects all its pieces. That does not seem obviously true at all for me. Imagine player A has a pawn that is not protected by any piece (but the emperor), this same pawn being under the attack of, let us say, a rook of player B′s. Then if player B captured the pawn with emperor B, the latter piece would thence lie on a protected cell and emperor A would not be able to capture it. Thus, in my logic, the pawn is not protected, even by emperor A. We could not say then that the emperor cannot capture anything lest the opponent emperor is already gone, nor could we say that an emperor protects all its pieces. This is supported by the absence of this remark in the article on maka dai dai shōgi.

Does someone know more about it?

UseresuUK (talk) 17:15, 27 April 2013 (UTC)

You're changing the rules for the two sides. If Emperor B can capture the protected pawn, then Emperor A can capture the protected emperor. If Emp. A cannot capture Emp. B because it's protected, then Emp. B cannot capture the protected pawn because it's protected. The rules are the same for both sides. — kwami (talk) 06:49, 28 April 2013 (UTC)

Does your asking of such questions indicate a willingness to actually play these games? :-) If so, big respect.

As for the emperor, I would say that this remark should really be in the maka-dai-dai page and not the tai page. In maka-dai-dai, there's only one royal piece at the beginning of the game. As long as you don't have a crown prince, you can't move into check and place your king/emperor in danger. So player B would not be able to capture the pawn in maka-dai-dai if he did not have a crown prince, by my logic: B's emperor would be captured before A's emperor. But in tai you have the crown prince from the start, so you can move into check or stay in check. So I would think that your sequence of moves would then be possible here. (It would also be possible if player B had a crown prince and they were playing maka-dai-dai.)

This is just my logic. These game rules become more and more incomplete the more you examine them, and sometimes you just have to choose what makes the most sense to you. Double sharp (talk) 06:46, 28 April 2013 (UTC)

That's weird. Your comment wasn't here when I started editing, so I should have gotten an edit conflict. I wonder why that fails to happen sometimes. — kwami (talk) 06:50, 28 April 2013 (UTC)

In a rule description of Maka Dai Dai Shogi that I received from someone from Japan that seems to be influential in the Japanese Chu Shogi Association, the ban on capturing protected pieces only applied to royals. I explicitly inquired about this, and was told that it would be allowed to capture a (say) Dragon that was attacked by a Rook with your Emperor in stead of the Rook. (A reason to do so could be that the Rook was pinned against your own Emperor by, say, a Bishop.) The meaning of 'protected' here also seems to be that after the move recapture should be possible (if you would have been allowed to play on without any royals left), i.e. 'hidden protectors' also protect a piece. In any case, my take on the prolem mentiones above is that any piece would count as protected by its Emperor, i.e. that the move you have to play to punish an illegal capture of a protected piece only needs to be pseudo-legal. This because it should also apply to the case where you now are left without any royal, where you could not legally make any moves at all. Allowing capture of protected non-royal pieces makes the problem largely moot, however. H.G.Muller (talk) 10:39, 10 March 2015 (UTC)

Capturing a deva or a dark spirit

Does someone know if, as in maka dai dai shōgi, the capture of a deva promotes the capturer to a teaching king and, likewise, the capture of a dark spirit promotes it to a buddhist spirit (I assume in any case this does not apply to a royal piece, though not mentioned)?

UseresuUK (talk) 17:23, 27 April 2013 (UTC)

I think so. It would make sense as the large variants usually keep the rules of the previous ones, taikyoku excepted (but then the rules for that one we currently know are almost certainly wrong). Double sharp (talk) 06:39, 28 April 2013 (UTC)

Contradiction

As has been noted by The Player of Games at BoardGameGeek, this article contradicts itself in having two tables of pieces giving two different promotions.

FWIW, I have intended since about 2012 to get this article into the layout of our articles on dai-dai and maka-dai-dai shogi. Doing that would also entail correcting this problem. Of course, it's also the start of 2022 now and I still haven't done it. My apologies, even if there's an obvious reason why I haven't. :( Maybe when I can kill some hours... Anyway, the fact that it's basically a combination of dai-dai and maka-dai-dai should make it a bit faster, when I actually can stomach enough courage and free time to start. Double sharp (talk) 12:30, 1 January 2022 (UTC)

I'm now convinced that the Japanese Wikipedia has it, if not "wrong", at least less playably. Firstly, it seems boring to have all the hook movers forced to demote on capture, since Japanese Wikipedia says promotion is compulsory on capture. At least with TSA rules you would still have the peacock and long-nosed goblin able to be used, while carefully trying to promote the old kite and poisonous snake. Also, the Japanese Wikipedia is confused about its own promotions (e.g. it says poisonous snake demotes to gold in tai shogi, and lists the fragrant elephant without a piece to promote into it). Finally, the presence of the wood general rather argues against the "free" mechanic of maka dai dai shogi, since you can't turn that limited-range general into a "free" piece.

The one difference the German Chu Shogi Association actually has with TSA is that they allow the crown prince to promote to emperor. (Previously there were a few other differences listed on this article, but apparently that's my mistake rather than real differences of the German Chu Shogi Association's, judging from Wayback Machine snapshots.) However, having multiple emperors on one side seems to be a bad idea (both for gameplay and for the intradiegetic implications), so I wouldn't adopt that.

In any case, it seems from the footnotes at dai dai shogi and maka dai dai shogi that the Edo-era sources strongly disagree with each other on many, many points. We can argue a bit about whether the TSA standardisations were justified, but it seems that for the most part, they were indispensable in getting these games to live in some form, rather than languish as mutually inconsistent rulesets. Which would be a real shame because those largely concern the non-power pieces, and therefore would have very little effect on actual gameplay. (I still disagree on tenjiku, where there did seem to be more natural choices, but working on the articles for dai dai and maka dai dai has really changed my view.) So my stance would be: follow TSA, except when it's obvious that they're really wrong (the lion-dog problem.) Happily enough, in that case most of the Western large-shogi-variant community agrees that they're wrong, so we still have a "standardised" rule set. With CVP as an independent source, I suppose – except for tai, but almost all its pieces appear in a smaller variant anyway.

(There is one other intervention, as I recall: the neighbouring king. This moves as drunk elephant according to TSA rules, but CVP in dai dai shogi has it moving as a king: one step in all directions. But I suppose intradiegetic logic could be used to support the CVP move. With such a large battle, presumably you have called a neighbouring king to alliance, and one hopes that he is not drunk!)

So I now have a mostly complete outline at User:Double sharp/Tai shogi. All that's left to do is to fill in the table of pieces, which should mostly be a copy-paste campaign from the smaller variants. Double sharp (talk) 14:30, 2 January 2022 (UTC)

Hmm, maybe the "side chariot" should be renamed the "racing chariot" as in dai dai shogi. And I should check Japanese Wikipedia for the "silver demon" / "silver hare". Double sharp (talk) 14:34, 2 January 2022 (UTC)

All done! :D Double sharp (talk) 13:56, 3 January 2022 (UTC)

Ah, I overlooked an argument. Under Japanese Wikipedia rules, the hook-moving pieces all have to demote to Gold on capture, and you can't even get the Hook Mover back because the Poisonous Snake also demotes to Gold. Maybe it's lack of imagination, but I can't see how you're going to ever checkmate an Emperor without them. :) Double sharp (talk) 09:58, 3 January 2022 (UTC)

Taishi

The taishi (太子) is referred to as King in some places in the text, and Prince in others. (Prince seems like the more accurate translation, but King reflects the analogy to chess). I don't have a strong opinion as to which name is better, but I would like to see all the references changed to the same name, with perhaps a note that XXX is called YYY by other writers. -- ABehrens (talk) 05:05, 18 July 2023 (UTC)

This was simply an error introduced in June 2023. "Prince" is correct. Double sharp (talk) 13:01, 27 September 2023 (UTC)