Shogi pieces in English: how to read the board without learning kanji

A chess-playing friend gets curious about shogi — an anime, a YouTube clip, the strange fact that captured pieces come back fighting for the other side — installs an app, opens it, and stares at a 9×9 grid of identical wooden wedges covered in characters they cannot read. Then they quietly close it. Not because the rules were hard. They never reached the rules.

The kanji on the pieces, not the rules, is the wall. So before any of the design story, here is the thing you actually came for: every piece, in English, with its character, its movement, and what it turns into.

The eight shogi pieces in English

Eight base pieces, six of which promote, all sharing one silhouette — that is fourteen distinct things to tell apart by character alone. Chess gives every piece its own shape, which is exactly why “I’ll just learn the six shapes” works there and has no equivalent here.

How the pieces move, for a chess player

If you already play chess, four things will trip you up — and they are the same four every time.

The gold is the centre of gravity. The gold general moves one step in any orthogonal direction plus the two forward diagonals: six squares, no diagonal retreat. It matters far beyond its own movement because four other promoted pieces all become a gold — promoted silver, knight, lance, and pawn move identically to it. Learn the gold’s six-square step once and you have learned the endgame behaviour of half the board.

The silver is the tricky one. One square straight forward, or one square in any diagonal — five squares. It can retreat diagonally but not straight back. Promote it and it gains a gold’s straight-back step but loses its diagonal retreats, which is precisely the kind of trade you regret when you needed the silver to come home diagonally two moves later. (Ask me how I learned to double-check that.)

The knight and lance cannot turn around. The knight jumps to one of two squares — two ranks forward and one file to the side, leaping over anything in between — and only forward; there is no backward knight move in shogi. The lance is a rook stripped down to a single direction: straight ahead, any distance, forever. Both are commitments. Once advanced, they do not come back.

The pawn captures straight. A shogi pawn moves one square forward and captures one square forward — never the diagonal capture you have wired into your hands from chess. There is no two-square first move and no en passant. There is, instead, the drop.

Drops are the rule that changes everything. When you capture a piece it joins your hand and can later be placed — dropped — onto any empty square as your whole move, fighting for you. A piece changes sides several times in a normal game. Pieces always drop in their unpromoted state, and there are a few legal limits worth knowing: you can’t have two of your own unpromoted pawns on the same file (nifu), you can’t drop a pawn to deliver immediate checkmate (uchifuzume), and you can’t drop a piece where it would have no legal move (a pawn or lance on the last rank, a knight on the last two).

Promotion itself is optional in the zone — the opponent’s back three ranks — except when a piece would otherwise be stuck with no move, in which case it must promote.

Reading and writing shogi moves in English

You do not need Japanese to read a recorded game either. English shogi notation is built straight from chess algebraic, with two conventions you’ll see in the wild.

Every piece is a letter: K king, R rook, B bishop, G gold, S silver, N knight, L lance, P pawn. A promoted piece gets a + in front (+R dragon, +B horse, +P tokin). A move is piece · connector · square, where the connector is - for a quiet move, x for a capture, and * for a drop from hand; a trailing + means you promoted on that move, = that you declined.

Squares are file then rank. Files run 1–9 right-to-left from Black’s side; ranks run top to bottom. The two systems differ only in how they letter the rank:

• Hodges (the standard in English shogi books, set by George Hodges in Shogi magazine in 1976) uses letters a–i for ranks: P-7f is a pawn to the 7th file, 6th rank.
• Hosking uses numbers 1–9 for ranks instead, so the same square is 76 and the move is P-76. Hosking also writes drops with an apostrophe — S'45 where Hodges writes S*4e.

So a few worked examples:

• P-7f — pawn moves to 7f (a standard opening move).
• S*4e — a silver, held in hand, dropped onto the empty square 4e.
• Bx8h+ — bishop captures on 8h and promotes to a horse.
• S3ax2b — and if you have seen the Hosking-numeric form S31x22, it is the identical move: a silver on file 3, rank 1 capturing on file 2, rank 2.

That’s the whole system. Piece letter, what happened, where. (Full tables, including the rarer disambiguation marks, live on the Wikipedia shogi-notation page.)

Why the characters are the real barrier — and why I didn’t just translate them

Everything above is the reference. The rest is the design story behind Shogiful, because “just use English pieces” turns out to hide three separate problems, and most internationalised sets solve only the first.

The obvious question is why shogi can’t simply draw a knight as a horse the way chess does. The answer is that the piece design is load-bearing. All forty pieces are one shape and one colour; ownership is shown by which way the wedge points, because that has to survive the drop rule — a captured piece joins your hand and comes back fighting for you. Fixed colours would lie about ownership; the rotating wedge can’t. So the characters do all the identity work. 歩 is a pawn, 銀 a silver, 飛 a rook; flip a piece on promotion and the character changes, usually to red, because promotion is a state change, not a piece swap. It is a beautifully compact system if you read the characters, and an undifferentiated field of identical wedges if you don’t.

A board you can actually read needs three things, not one:

Identity — a distinct, instantly-parseable symbol per piece. This is the easy part, and where most sets stop.

Movement — the part that matters. A newcomer doesn’t know a lance only goes forward, that a knight has exactly two destination squares, that a silver can’t step sideways. Shogiful’s Western icons carry a small movement diagram in the piece itself, so the icon teaches its own legal moves — which pays off most with that gold family, where promoted silver, knight, lance, and pawn all move alike and the icons make the family resemblance visible instead of four arbitrary facts to memorise.

Promotion state — traditional sets flip to red characters; a Western set needs an equally unmissable change, not just a tint, because “did that silver promote?” is exactly the question you can’t afford to get wrong when you’re working out whether it can retreat.

There’s one decision hiding in plain sight: the default. Shogiful shows the Western set outside Japanese locales, because a first-launch screen asking a brand-new player to choose between “traditional” and “Western” pieces is asking for an informed decision before they’ve seen the board. The locale already answered the question; the toggle in Settings is for when they change their mind.

Learn the pieces first, the kanji second

Here’s the honest trade-off, because it’s real: the broader shogi world runs on kanji. Books, problem collections, Japanese apps, real boards, every diagram on every shogi site — all kanji. A player who stays on Western pieces forever has a ceiling on what they can read.

So the Western set is built to be temporary. The piece guide is one tap from every game, showing both styles side by side; training introduces the characters progressively — you meet 銀 after you already know how a silver behaves, which is dramatically easier than learning symbol and behaviour at once. Behaviour first, symbol second, is the entire thesis. Nobody learns chess by memorising the letters K, Q, R, B, N before their first game; shogi outside Japan has effectively demanded the equivalent for decades, then wondered why the game doesn’t travel.

A board you can read on move one

The readable board is the front door. What’s behind it is the reason Shogiful exists: every game analysed on-device by YaneuraOu, the strongest open-source shogi engine, with mistakes explained in plain sentences — the missed knight-drop fork, the edge pawn that cracked your castle — and training generated from your own recurring errors. None of that coaching reaches a player who bounced off the board on day one. The piece set isn’t a feature; it’s the precondition for every other feature.

If what you want is ranked play against humans, the online platforms are the right tools — and worth knowing the board there is all kanji, which is the whole problem this page is about: Lishogi (free, open-source), 81Dojo (the international dojo), and PiyoShogi (a fine free beginner app) are the usual starting points. For the full category — offline trainers included — there’s our honest guide to the best shogi apps for iPhone.

Shogiful itself is on the App Store for iPhone, iPad, and Mac — free to try, with the full coaching loop from $1.99/month or $19.99 once. The app page has the methodology, an honest comparison with the online platforms, and six worked examples of what a plain-language shogi mistake looks like.