Making shogi readable — designing a board you can play before you can read it

I built Shogiful after watching the same thing happen three times: a chess-playing friend gets curious about shogi — an anime, a YouTube video, the fact that captured pieces come back — installs an app, opens it, stares at a 9×9 grid of wooden wedges with characters they cannot read, and quietly closes it. Not because the rules are hard. They never got to the rules.

Chess players are the natural audience for shogi outside Japan, and the kanji pieces filter most of them out at the door. Every product decision in Shogiful starts from that fact.

Why shogi pieces can’t just be redrawn like chess pieces

The obvious question is: why not just draw a knight as a horse, like chess? The answer is that shogi’s piece design is load-bearing in ways chess’s isn’t.

All forty pieces are the same shape — a pentagonal wedge — and the same color. There are no black and white armies. Ownership is shown by which way the wedge points, because that has to survive the defining rule of shogi: when you capture a piece, it joins your hand and can be dropped back onto the board fighting for you. A piece changes sides several times in a normal game. Fixed colors would lie about ownership; the rotating wedge can’t.

So the characters are doing all the identity work. 歩 is a pawn, 銀 is a silver, 飛 is a rook. Flip a piece over on promotion and the character changes — usually to red — because promotion in shogi is a state change, not a piece swap. It’s a beautifully compact system if you read the characters. If you don’t, every piece on the board is the same piece.

Chess never has this problem, which is why “I’ll just learn the six piece shapes” works there and nothing equivalent works in shogi. Eight base pieces, six of which promote, all sharing one silhouette: that’s fourteen states to distinguish by character alone.

What a readable board actually requires

The fix sounds trivial — “use Western icons” — and several apps offer internationalized piece options. Building one that actually works taught me it has three separate requirements, and most sets stop after the first.

Identity. Each piece needs a distinct, instantly-parseable symbol. This is the easy part.

Movement. This is the part that matters. A chess player meeting shogi for the first time doesn’t know that a lance only moves straight forward, that a knight has exactly two squares it can ever jump to, or that a silver can’t step sideways. Shogiful’s Western icons carry a small movement diagram in the piece itself — the icon teaches its own legal moves. This pays off most with the promoted pieces: a promoted silver, promoted knight, promoted lance, and promoted pawn all move identically to a gold, and the icons make that family resemblance visible instead of asking you to memorize four arbitrary facts.

Promotion state. Traditional sets flip the piece to red characters. A Western set needs an equally unmissable state change — Shogiful uses a distinct promoted icon, not just a tint, because “did that silver promote?” is exactly the question you can’t afford to get wrong when you’re calculating whether it can retreat. (It can’t step diagonally backward anymore. Ask me how I learned to double-check that.)

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

The kanji are the destination, not the entry fee

Here’s where I’ll be honest about the 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 Shogiful is built to make its own Western set temporary. The piece guide is one tap away in every game, showing each piece in both styles side by side. Training sessions introduce the characters progressively — you learn 銀 after you already know how a silver behaves, which turns out to be dramatically easier than learning the symbol and the behavior at once. The traditional set is always one toggle away, and the app quietly expects you to flip it eventually.

That sequencing — behavior first, symbol second — is the entire thesis. Nobody learns chess by memorizing the letters K, Q, R, B, N before their first game. Shogi outside Japan has effectively been demanding the equivalent for decades, and then wondering why the game doesn’t travel.

Where this fits in the bigger app

The readable board is the front door; the reason Shogiful exists is what’s behind it — every game analyzed on-device by YaneuraOu, mistakes explained in plain-language 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 works if the player bounced off the board on day one. The piece set isn’t a feature; it’s the precondition for all the other features.

Shogiful 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, the honest comparison with the online platforms, and six worked examples of what a plain-language shogi mistake looks like.