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The world's cutest chess master strikes!
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this post was submitted on 04 Apr 2025
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Board Games
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I appreciate the lengthy explanation!
I tried playing Shogi a few times but I could never quite wrap my head around the strategies - big board, lots of pieces, different promotion rules and, of course, the drop really made my head hurt! Probably my inability to differentiate the pieces at a glance didn't help, either.
This one sounds a lot more similar to the game I'm accustomed to. The river and palace rules sound interesting, and the low number of pieces keep it "simple" enough (as much as chess is simple, of course). I might want to look at it more closely in the future. My friend is a lot better at chess than me (1600 ELO vs 1000), I could use this game to spice things up and maybe even the field a bit :P
I'm with you on Shogi. I find that it's on the least-elegant side of the chess spectrum and I just never managed to internalize the rules. I've tried it a few times, but I return to Xiangqi as a good, fast-moving game (that I completely and utterly suck at … but enjoy to pieces nonetheless).
You can find sets that use pictures or shaped pieces instead of Chinese characters, which will make it a lot easier to keep track of the board state.
As an alternative, for training up, you can print up circular labels of the appropriate size with the Chinese characters and their English meanings and stick them on the bottom of the playing pieces. Just play with the pieces upside-down until you're used to the characters.