Description

Source: http://www.drjochum.de/ via http://www.archive.org

Hexagonal Kyoto Shogi is Tamiya Katsuya's Kyoto Shogi adapted to a 37-cell hexagonal board. The movement of the pieces is based on Wladyslaw Glinski's Hexagonal Chess.

As with all Shogi variants, the objective is to checkmate your opponent's king. Unlike chess, Shogi pieces are flat, all the same color, and pentagonal. Ownership of a piece is indicated by the direction it is pointing. When you capture a piece, you may on a later turn place that piece on the board and use it as your own.

At the start of the game, each player has five pieces, which appear from left-to-right in the following order:

• Tokin, which moves like a Gold General (Lance)
• Silver General (Bishop)
• King
• Gold General (Knight)
• Pawn (Rook)

The name in parenthesis is the piece's promoted value; when a piece promotes. it is flipped to its promoted side. However, the unusual feature that this game shares with Kyoto Shogi is that a piece must promote (and demote) every time it is moved.

Because of the geometry of the hexagonal board, some pieces have more, and less, mobility than its counterparts on a square board. For example, the King in Shogi may move in one of eight directions, while in this game, it has a choice of twelve.