For those interested in playing and learning Shogi, take a look over at the great site https://lishogi.org -- a fork of LiChess for Shogi that includes real-time and correspondence play, AI opponents, analysis, puzzles and more. One of my favorite variants, Kyoto Shogi, is also available. The website https://pychess.org also has a ton of interesting and unique variants both traditional (Makruk) and modern (Chennis!).
If you want to play chess-meets-shogi, try the 'Crazyhouse' variant on lichess. I'm often fighting anonymous bullet games while waiting for CI pipelines to finish..
Crazyhouse is a fun game, but I find it inferior to both chess and shogi. Shogi without drop moves would be rather dull. The board is too big, and the pieces too slow-moving. Chess with drop moves (i.e. Crazyhouse) is too chaotic; drops make the already powerful pieces overpowered on such a small board. Chess and shogi are both nicely balanced games, Crazyhouse is not.
Another problem with Crazyhouse is that you can’t easily play it with a physical chess set. You can only play online, which some of us find hard to enjoy.
Absolutely! And I'm one of them :) Check out the Shogi Harbor community[1] and their Discord[2]. There's a lot of discussion there and they're very friendly.
The kanji on the pieces adds a significant potential barrier. I started with the piece set that had little directional pips on them and different colors to help (it's the twelfth set in the piece set list when you go to the settings gear on Lishogi).
One thing that kinda sucks in Tokyo in particular is a dearth of just chill public spaces. I think Go and Shogi both benefit from incumbent status, with club spaces and the like existing. Chess meetups right now seem to be relegated to city community spaces (glad they exist!). But I was real jealous when I was in Brisbane for a bit and visisted a chess meetup that was just happening in a cafe. Also saw some kids playing in the local library. It's nice for there to be spaces that allow for activities that don't require an exchange of money beyond maybe buying one drink.
yup. Big reason behind the social isolaion that was happening even before the pandemic.
- Shops become corporatized, elbow out the mom and pops, and try to minimize loitering. This is combined with the decline of malls in some countries so there isn't really a "hang out" place anymore
- community centers shrank and closed down, with the reamining becoming more focused on parents and children, so not quite a place for some 20/30s age single people to mingle.
- decline in religious beliefs kn the newer generations mean church or similar sorts of groups aren't an option.
In other words, If you're single and not into a bar scene, the Third Place is nearly impossible to find these days. There are still in theory plenty of places left that I didn't list, but my personal experience reflects a lot of "Bowling Alone". I can be in a cafe or gym, but I haven't felt I was a part of a social experience in such environments since college. It's no different from being behind someone at a cash register; maybe I can get some small talk, but it never translates to a continuing friendship.
> Examples of third places include churches, cafes, clubs, public libraries, gyms, bookstores, stoops and parks. In his book The Great Good Place (1989), Ray Oldenburg argues that third places are important for civil society, democracy, civic engagement, and establishing feelings of a sense of place.
I wonder if there is an online example as well for something like this. I was tempted to say something like forums but I don't think that's the case.
For the younger generations Fortnite has a third-place vibe, which is fascinating to me as someone that played FPS as a youngin and never considered using them primarily to socialize
There's an abundance of chill public spaces in Tokyo! So many cool parks, public rooftop spaces, and so on. I think it's just cause chess isn't popular.
There are nice spots, but a lot of them do not want you organizing events inside them. Like many things this is all pretty funancialized (it doesn’t help that new constructions are almost all filled with chains staffed by part-time staff).
On top of that parks don’t tend to have that many tables (Yoyogi exists but Yoyogi is one park).
Community spaces kinda work but you need a quorum of people who live in the ward, so there’s some startup difficulties there.
Chess isn’t that popular but it’s a hell of a lot easier in many places to just take over a space during sleepy weekend AMs.
At least in US which is also usually pretty commercial it is a lot more palatable to propose to a business owner if you promise to come in during an extremely slow time period (e.g. Monday for a bar). But otherwise the worst for the owners is a bunch of slow people sitting a long time ordering very cheap things, taking seats from more spendy, higher turnover customers.
It also doesn’t help that my impression of Japan when I went there, was that a lot of these small businesses have room for maybe a dozen people at best.
Yeah that's a good point. I know a couple events whose scheduling is "we ask the bar what day they usually have ~0 people, and we will instead bring 30 people". Always seems a bit limited to bars, but it's something!
Restaurants can also be willing to host especially if they’re open all day and have slow times. One restaurant even put up a plaque for the group that has been meeting there at 10AM on Mondays for ten+ years.
Coffee shops are smaller these days, but for a small group it can work.
Looking at these temperature plots, it seems comparable to late March here in Toronto, or Chicago, or New York. Slightly lower temperature swing. Some days could be quite nice - warm, even. Others could be near freezing, with wind chill making exposed hands uncomfortably cold. Not great for chess.
Maybe not too cold, but definitely too hot to be in direct sunlight.
I meant chill in the “not caring that you are playing chess in the place”. Most cafes or restaurants here have express rules against playing card games or the like at tables, for example (for good reason)
If you're sitting there playing card games (especially if you're young and cash-strapped), you're gonna hog a table for a while and order the bare minimum. All the while there might be people lining up to come in, or even worse people deciding against coming in cuz it's full.
This is more of a problem in high traffic areas ofc, but like on the weekend _lots of places_ are high-traffic.
Ultimately the deeper problem is that places like cafes and restaurants are mostly "give us money so we can pay the building's rent". The margins are super thin from the get-go, and rent is so high that places really really really need to cycle through people during peak hours.
High rent means smaller restaurants, means that (say) 4 tables locked in for a long period is a much bigger deal, and the variability is a much higher problem.
Of course if you go to a place that's very empty from the get go and is pretty big, people don't really care. Just that there aren't that many places like that in major traffic centers.
Only after 18 I ever had trouble with playing in a bar/café. I always ask before, and sometimes they loan you the game. I even have a bar where I can play chess until 1:45 (it close at 2) and they're the one loaning the chessboard.
I remember first coming to Japan and playing a round of chess with someone who had mostly never played but was very strong at Shogi. I'm not master or anything but had played a lot and was still generally confident in tactics, and had experience playing with new players, adjusting to keep a good game pace while still winning.
Got obliterated.
Also then started playing Shogi with him for the first time and while it didn't take that long to triumph with an all pawns handicap, after much effort finally reached being able to win including rooks/bishops. But it was obviously basically cheating since eventually you realize how easy it is to win with handicap be just putting 100% into defense.
Anyways, with those games to me it really felt that Shogi is the more strategic game, having similar mechanics to chess but being more dynamic. Chess in the end, even looking at GM matches, looks like much more pattern matching, i.e., tactics.
So my takeaway from that was that as much as I enjoy chess, Shogi is just the more complex game and its experts may just be able to defeat masters if they cared to because of the otherwise similar mechanics, as one of the anecdotes in the article.
Random share this is just personal but honest feeling from past experience and not an endorsement. Really fun memories.
Another way to ask this question is: why is go less popular outside east asia? It's huge in Japan, China and Korea, and although it has its fans in Europe and the US, it's much more niche there.
I've got to admit, since I got kids I moved back from go to chess. Somehow it's more accessible, because everybody here knows chess.
I'm not even convinced Go is all that popular in Japan compared to Shogi or Mahjong. Even Gomoku (five in a row, no capture rule) seems more popular. I can't really say anything about the popularity of go salons since I have yet to visit one but I can't help but notice that the game is never included as a minigame in Japanese titles like the Yakuza series (which has all sorts of other board minigames) or even Clubhouse Games for the Switch (51 games, one of them Gomoku, but no Go). It'd probably take another Hikaru no Go to increase popularity again...
I suspect the lack of Go in Yakuza or Clubhouse has more to do with the computational complexity of providing a decent computer opponent to play against.
There are multiple factors and I’m not sure what the exact cause is either. The relative difficulty to build a playable bot is one. A Go game being relatively long and taxing may be another. Go also traditionally has a reputation of being a game for bureaucrats and intellectuals, while Shogi being a more people’s game. The obvious parallel between the battlefield also makes Shogi more popular among samurais, who yakuzas draw a lot of inspiration from.
In general I think the two are of comparable popularity in Japan, but I wouldn’t be surprised if real yakuza people do like and play Shogi much more than Go.
Decent relative to what? These games include various card games too which in theory are even harder for AIs to beat pros at. I'd be surprised if the other minigame engines are actually decent to a skilled amateur on their hardest difficulty. The AI complexity is also irrelevant to many of these games being playable with a friend in person or online.
The length of the game is also something easily tweaked, just default the board size to 9x9 and offer 13x13 and 19x19.
What I really liked about the anime, assume it's the case in the manga too, was the sheer number and diversity of regular, older people.
Obviously they weren't trying to paper over that it was mainly an old person's game in Japan at the time (I would assume it still is, too). But that didn't make it seem less appealing.
Also, the portrayal of foreigners in that series is worth a study in itself.
Tradition + first movers advantage/network effect. We have a centuries old tradition of playing chess in europe, we dont have a tradition of playing go (and vice versa for east asia). And as you said, once everyone already knows how to play chess it's much easier to also play it vs a relatively unknown game (part of the reason why D&D is the most popular tabletop RPG - everybody knows D&D!)
I'm no chess expert, but I think because at 17... Bxa4 followed by 18... Bxh2, the double bishop sacrifice, it's not obvious how Black will then dominate the rest of the game.
I just wanted to say, I stumbled upon your website a few years ago through the Tromp-Taylor rules of Go and found the things you do impressive and inspiring. It’s a nice surprise to see you commenting here.
So to summarize, the game tree complexity is estimated by estimating the branching factor and the game length, and raising the former to the power of the latter.
I find it slightly odd that the game length is calibrated to "reasonable" games but the branching factor is not.
If the goal is to estimate the number of possible games of go, then the calculation would be dominated by the number of long games rather than the number of short games, and very long games are possible.
If the goal is to estimate the number of "reasonable" games of go, then the branching factor should also be much smaller, as most possible moves are not reasonable. Perhaps the logarithm of the branching factor could be estimated as the entropy of some policy model such at that of KataGo.
P.S. I am happy to have received a reply from the mighty Tromp!
The article does give this away early, but the answer is "no, chess is popular but not (yet) for the western variant". AFAIK this is same for all East Asian countries. That does make me wonder if chess (or more accurately, all games thought to originate from Chaturanga) is the first ever internationally distributed game.
Go became "international" 200 years before the earliest forerunner of chess had even been invented. That's when it spread from China to Korea. And it reached Japan around the same time chess's earliest forerunner was being invented in India.
Beyond that it seems likely that dice games from e.g. Romans, Egyptians, Assyrians were likely the first to spread as those empires spread and the soldiers who played them played them with locals.
According to [1], in Japan, 4.5M people play Mahjong (in Japan you can assume Mahjong means Riichi Mahjong), 5M people play Shogi, and only 1.5M play Go.
Interestingly 21M (!) people play family games, which means party video games, e.g. Mario Kart.
I don't know for riichi mahjong, but "mahjong" is pretty popular, yes. But the betting aspect puts it probably closer to poker than chess or other games where money is rarely involved.
At least in my circles it is common that people play or have played, especially males. I myself play on average two tables or so per day online. Although I certainly should force myself to read up a bit more on strategy.
Not exactly. "riichi" comes from Mandarin, which might be related to "reach"[1] (can someone confirm?). It is an original word, although maybe a loan word, an the pronunciation might just have been kept faithful to the original because for all three languages (English, Chinese, Japanese) the length of vowels are sometimes meaningful (unlike e.g. in French).
He certainly had his insanities but some accounts say he was quite sane in his later years, and it must be amusing to be possibly the GOAT and living incognito in a place where chess wasn’t played much.
What I like about Go, is its combination of simple rules, contrasted with the rich set of ever-more advanced tactics. And (using handicaps) players of different skill can still enjoy a somewhat-balanced game.
There are just a few basic rules (board sizes, placement of stones, groups, freedoms, atari, capture) that are easily explained. Beginners may think it's a simple game then. Wrong!
From these follow more basic concepts like eyes, living/dead groups, effect of corners vs. edges vs. center, snapbacks, etc.
And then you get into more advanced tactics like netting, semi-connected groups, forcing moves, thin/thick positions, Ko fights, responding to opponent vs. just leaving a position as-is & play elsewhere on the board, etc.
Strong players can read ahead further than weaker players, or play more from their intuition ("that position looks weak, let's step in there & take some territory" style).
This is what makes it interesting computationally: it's difficult to evaluate positions, to put a number on how good a move is (although experienced players can easily spot a bad move when they see one), or getting a grip on the # of possible board positions.
So it could take a lifetime to master Go. AlphaGo has thrown another curveball into this.
Other games add complexity through their ruleset, board or # of pieces. Kind of: mastering the rules of the game, vs. mastering the game itself.
"While the Baroque rules of Chess could only have been created by humans, the rules of Go are so elegant, organic, and rigorously logical that if intelligent life forms exist elsewhere in the universe they almost certainly play Go." - Edward Lasker
Japanese version is probably very close to the tactical game, with a lot of random of course. Over the course of several full games in a row, strong players are consistently ahead in the ratings even if they are set back by some random big loss in a single game. It is not a chess or go level of course, but also not a simple solitaire with tiles game anymore. The main tactical problem in the riichi is that discarding someone's winning tile makes you responsible for full amount of points, and to avoid that you need to discern what could be such tile just by looking only at the discards and player actions, which is possible for high level players.
> Even with all of the online resources now, nothing beats learning from playing over the board, so it’s been heart-warming to see the gradual yet real strides chess in Japan is making so people can ... find more chess clubs near them and nurture their love for the game.
I live in Yokohama. I wasn’t aware of any chess clubs near me, but a web search turns up one in Yokohama [1] and one in neighboring Kawasaki [2]; there are more than twenty others nationwide [3].
This contrasts, though, with the much larger number of go clubs. There seem to be over thirty in Yokohama alone, including at least three within walking distance of my home. Some go clubs are small, like one on the fourth floor of a building a few blocks away [4], while others are quite large [5].
I learned how to play go in the U.S. in the late 1970s. For a few years after I moved to Japan in 1983, I sometimes played in go clubs around Tokyo. They were an interesting scene: smoke-filled rooms full of middle-aged and older men, many of whom seemed to spend all day every day there, playing game after game. There wasn’t much talking or socializing; often two people would play an entire game without exchanging more than a word or two.
The first go club I ventured into, before I could speak much Japanese, was in Kabukicho on the edge of the redlight district. It was livelier than the ones I went to later, perhaps because, unlike most other go clubs, it served alcohol and was open all night. It seems to have moved to a new location deeper into Kabukicho, surrounded by bars and love hotels [6].
I never got very strong at go—maybe 4 or 5 kyu—and I haven’t played a regular game in many years. But recently, at my daughter’s request, I have started teaching my grandson how to play. It will be interesting to see if he likes it. If he does, I might show him chess, too.
I just watched a tutorial on Shogi and apparently the pieces are distinguished from each other by the Japanese-language symbols on them, which is a deal-breaker for me.
It's really easy to get used to. It's not in principle harder than learning the chess pieces. You don't have to learn what the symbols mean, any more than you do for Mahjong.
You don’t need to be able to read the character. You only need to be able to remember that the piece that looks like this moves like that. This is no different from western chess.
Because go got there first? Assuming most people only have enough desire to learn one deep board game, chess then has to overcome a network effect to become popular.
That's debatable. Maybe shogi is superior to chess because it's a longer game and pieces can change side. Or maybe Chinese chess are better because they are a faster game with less pieces and more movement.
Go is definitely better than all of them though, at least for me, and yet it's less popular than any game of chess in any country.
I don't understand why people compare Go with Chess or Shogi like this. It's not a competition, they're entirely different kinds of games, and for the most part there's loads of people who play both anyways! Real "Trek vs. Wars" nonsense
Anecdotally I saw many people playing Chinese chess on streets all around China but I never saw anybody playing Go/Weiqi. I saw people playing Mahjong and games of cards (long thin cards.)
I don't know which game of chess is popular in Korea, western or Chinese ones? Or is there a Korean variant? About the popularity of Go/Baduk there I was told that it was because of the three years of mandatory military service and the availability of go boards in the barracks.
what I mean is that in China, Chinese chess > go > western chess in popularity
Korea has its own variant of Chinese chess, with some interesting rules like the Elephant being allowed to cross the water. Go (Baduk) is absolutely more popular than Chinese/Korean Chess in Korea and definitely more than western Chess
He said the openings were all really routine/reactive, and the endgame was way too much chasing. To him, it was fairly obvious who was going to win after the midgame if it isn't evenly matched, but you're still spending most of the time repeating the same moves to advance pawns and pretty much waiting for mistakes in the endgame.
Xiangqi has a much more tactical opening, longer more varied midgame, and usually the game ends pretty quickly if someone has an advantage coming out of midgame, but otherwise at least the endgame doesn't get repetitive. But also because no matter how far behind you are in the endgame, you're still a threat because of the flying general rule so it doesn't feel as bad being on defensive.
>He said the openings were all really routine/reactive, and the endgame was way too much chasing.
Openings in normal chess are indeed pointless memorization. I would never have gotten into chess as well, if i had to memorize openings. However Chess960 nowadays exists, and it is thriving. Granted 15 years ago, no one played that variant.
Chess 960 expands the surface area of opening move possibilities by a factor of a thousand (960 to be more accurate). So if someone wants to memorize openings for 1 move, i.e. 2 plys, he has to memorize 2.000 possibilities. If someone wants to memorize 3 moves ahead, i.e. 6 plys, he has to memorize 6.000 possibilities.
In normal chess memorizing ten or fifteen moves ahead (i.e. 20 or 30 plys) is pretty much the norm.
>and the endgame was way too much chasing.
With all due respect to your dad, that's nonsense. Endgames almost always have the potential to outsmart and outmanoeuvre the opponent, like any other part of the game.
See a game [1] i played against goga-magoga ranked 200 in the site, in which for 70 moves i was always losing or equal, and i won the last 3 moves. Endgames are so unintuitive, almost like programming, that even the best players in the world get confused and fatigued by the complexity.
> Endgames almost always have the potential to outsmart and outmanoeuvre the opponent, like any other part of the game.
In an evenly matched endgame, sure. I think those endgames are fun, but rare when playing in person since there's usually a skill mismatch. He was complaining about the typical game where there's a mismatched endgame where one side has an obvious advantage but there's still a bunch of chase to close out the game.
There's no doubt that the endgame can get complex, but with chess a different kind of problem solving than the rest of the game and one that I understand why people don't find it fun.
I always thought there was a bit of irony with how much he disliked the chess endgame, because he was hopelessly addicted to playing go which is not that unlike to a pawns-only chess endgame in thinking.
Endgames get sometimes boring indeed, but are other games exciting all the time? Soccer for example has it's exciting moments and it's boring moments.
That's why the endgame is called the technical part of the game. More like an electrician connecting electrodes together, or maybe programming, the end result might be beautiful, regardless of some boring moments.
Oh, Fischer Random Chess. Except Bobby Fischer made some Nazi-level antisemitic comments, so new name. 960 because of 960 possible starting layouts. So, Chess960 it is, then.
No, not really. Compared to just about any game I’ve played it rarely gets stuck, and when you are up decisively it usually ends quickly.
Also most everyone plays time controls that completely avoid this.
Feels like people are reaching for reasons to dislike it here. It’s the most balanced and fun game I’ve found, and these issues ring totally hollow I think to anyone who plays it regularly.
There are some other issues you could point out, but they mostly exist entirely in classical time controls, or perhaps if you enjoy a less rigid and punishing game.
> ring totally hollow I think to anyone who plays it regularly
Obviously for a hobbyist player the experience is very different from people learning the ropes. Think the "kid playing against his dad at the cottage" experience. The kind of people who don't know any named openings other than the scholar's mate. The kind of players that don't know their own ELO.
Idk I picked it up for the first time basically just 6 months ago and had a blast from the start. I'd say 99% of people play rapid or faster time controls and never get into slogs, it's one of the least sloggy games I've played. Catan for example is like 10x more prone to annoying endgames.
My favorite endgames are in Arimaa[0], an abstract strategy game that can be played on a chess board. The goal is to advance a pawn-equivalent piece to the back rank. This becomes easier for both players as the game progresses and pieces are captured. Arimaa endgames are generally "sharp" in the chess sense (as in requiring extreme tactical precision because each move is so impactful), and don't involve any chasing. Surprising comebacks for players with lesser material are possible.
However, the opening can be very slow if both players play defensively.
