when I was a little lete
As a young child I remember the first time I was put in front of a chessboard that didn't quite look like the uninterrupted rank-and-file grids of western chess. There were no black-and-white spaces. There was a giant "X" where the King and Queen should have gone. And the King and Queen themselves were also nowhere to be found, replaced with flat, wafer-like pieces with Chinese character printed on them.
This was my first exposure to xiangqi, janggi, and very soon after, shogi; the trio of East Asian "chess"es that don't involve round stones (I haven't forgotten about you, go, we're just not going to talk about you today). With different board and different pieces also came different rules, all of which I ignored in favor of a much simpler endeavor. Alkkagi / tanqi, a game where you flick your team's pieces into the opponent's with the objective of knocking them off the board. Paper sumo or Super Smash Bros., take your pick on which comparison you want.
Without even noticing, I would one day play my final round of alkkagi and forget about it for the next few decades. Until...
WELCOME TO ULTRA SHOGI
Cue the explosive entry of 超将棋 (Chou-Shogi, "Ultra Shogi") a free 2021 indie game by Fortgs. The video trailer on the game's Steam page demonstrates the premise beautifully. What if alkkagi, but with shogi pieces... and shogi rules?
Wooden pieces charge up and slam into each other in a battle for supremacy, sending each other flying off the table in slapstick fashion. And yet, pieces retain their original shogi moves. They undergo promotions just like normal shogi. The turn-based mode is surprisingly methodical. That's right, as wild and chaotic as board-game bumper-cars can easily be, Chou-Shogi manages to reconcile childlike simplicity with a surprising amount of respect for the more strait-laced shogi's rules.
What at first might seem to be a purely slapstick joke game had turned out to be a thoughtful physics puzzler.
global shogi taisen?
Even if you're unfamiliar with the rules of shogi like I (still) am, Chou-Shogi's brief tutorial teaches you everything you need to know about how to play this oddball variant. Using chess as an analogue, you and your opponent take turns moving a piece of your choice and following that given piece's restrictions on how it can move. The type of piece will affect the directions it can go in, the amount it can charge up before launching itself, and how those attributes change when that piece is promoted.
After a couple minutes in the tutorial you're ready to...
Well, here's the hang-up: at the time of writing, a few years after Chou-Shogi's release, the online lobby for global multiplayer is pretty quiet. It's a fate that befalls many neat-but-niche multiplayer titles, especially this peculiarly-faithful Japanese-language-only action-shogi game. If you do manage to get into an online match, you're forced to play in real-time mode until you reach Rank 5, at which point then you can go to the handicap settings and switch the match mode to turn-based.
There is also currently no offline vs. CPU mode for the main match style.
But we're not out of luck yet if you're looking for a quick jump-in-and-play, methodical puzzler. Let me introduce you to...
(chou) tsume-shogi
tsume-shogi are shogi puzzles, pretty much its version of chess problems. And, thankfully, Chou-Shogi has its own dedicated tsume mode, chock-full of puzzles that are purpose-built to make the most of the game's unique form of ballistic shogi tactics.
There are twenty-eight puzzle scenarios on offer, complete with a 3-star ranking system that grades you on the efficiency and elegance of your clear. These stages are spread across beginner, intermediate, and advanced classes that progressively push your Chou-Shogi skill in a way that almost feels like a super-tutorial of sorts. Master all of the tsume problems and you'll be that much more prepared for a real online match afterward.
The more challenging puzzles on the back-half can really press you to think laterally, and a few stars of the show even make it necessary to bring movement in the third dimension into the mix. Yep, you can (and sometimes should) flip your shogi piece up towards the sky and launch it skywards in order to hit your targets the way you need for a 3-star clear.
While most of Chou-Shogi's tsume problems are purely turn-based, there are a few where timing is added to the mix: your opponent might move in real-time while you, the player, are still stuck with a strict numerical turn limit. The odds might feel stacked against you, but those are exactly the kinds of puzzles that feel so satisfying to finally crack... and then later bust open with a brilliant 3-star perfect clear.
give it a shot!
As of writing, I have cleared all of Chou-Shogi's tsume-shogi puzzles, including ranking full 3-stars on the beginner-class stages. This process was a fun mix of trial-and-error and flashes of insight as I would retry puzzles again and again, changing up the strategy slightly to see if I could sneak in just one more star for the level.
The glory is only slightly dampened by the fact that Steam achievements appear to be broken for me at this time, leaving me at a clean 0 out of 13 chievos for this game. Even so, I had a lot of fun with even just this half of Chou-Shogi, and hope against hope that a local VS CPU mode may be added in the future.
Until then, download Chou-Shogi and try out the tsume puzzles. Maybe even see if you can get into an online match. Even if you don't read Japanese, the game is intuitive to play and navigate. You can click any of your pieces to preview its possible moves as you learn the characters (something I still haven't entirely done either!). Not so competitive for a real-time battle, but more than enough for the focused scenarios of the tsume puzzles. (Important note: the arrows that appear after a left-click will move you in a straight line; the arrows from a right-click will look a little different and work to rotate the piece--not just parallel to the board, but even flipped upwards in 3D space like below when done right.)
Here's Chou-Shogi's Steam page again where you can download and play it, completely for free. I never thought a shogi game from 2021 would help me relive those faded memories of alkkagi so many years ago, but I'm certainly glad that it did.
Hope you have fun! See you in the next one.