Thread 96834488

How come Shogi hasn't become more popular in the West when it's quite literally Chess but better without the "just another chess variant" debuff?

Two of the most boring aspects of chess are the fixed start and half of the game being a memory puzzle. Shogi's reintroduction of pieces directly fixes later and indirectly lessens the shitness of the former.

Fischer Random was a nice attempt, and although it's by far the best Chess variant there is no real need for it when Shogi already exists.

>>96834488 (OP)
>fixes later
fixes the latter*

>>96834488 (OP)
You need to understand that the majority of Chess players are snobbish retards who just want to seem smart. They are emotionally attached to it.

Chess's popularity is not because it is a good game. It comes from the compounding effects of popularity and the culture that's built around the game.

There have been countless variations proposed to improve Chess, and none will ever take hold because the people who play Chess are not playing to have fun, they're playing to try and obtain that perceived status of being more intelligent.

The only way to fix Chess is to reveal to the world how little intelligence and Chess skill actually correlate, but with the people who are in the best position to reveal that also having the most to lose if this knowledge did become wide-spread, you can expect them to instead continue to pour all their money and resources into promoting Chess as the game for geniuses instead of the game for dweebs.

>>96834523
>we must "fix" old thing because it is old!
Sorry but no

>>96834670
More like
>we must improve because of obvious flaw

>>96834523
Chess is the dnd of abstract fantasy games with non-identical pieces?

>>96834682
Some people think Vermont being 99% White is a flaw, why should people who play chess care about what you see as flaws?

>>96834488 (OP)
> And then we spend the first 20 moves setting up our fortresses.
> You're gote and i'm sente. No, white and black is totally inappropriate here.
> The pieces are actually easy to tell apart after your first 100 games.
> Please no westernizing the pieces, its an insult to Nihon.

Gee I wonder why this never caught on.

>>96834488 (OP)
>Two of the most boring aspects of chess are the fixed start and half of the game being a memory puzzle.

[citation needed]

>>96834488 (OP)
seething about "memory puzzles" is the most braindead shit imaginable, literally every competitive game requires the same type of technical mastery that chess does if you want to actually be good at them

>>96834488 (OP)
An attempt was made.

It was called Navia Drapt.

Players bought starter sets then could buy booster boxes to expand their armies. Each unit was unique, moved in different ways, had special abilities, and could perform a "drapt" action which caused it to move differently or activated another ability.

There was an anime in the works (teaser trailer's on youtube)

It died fuggen quick. Turns out the only thing worse than Chess is Shogi, and the only thing worse than Shogi is when you make it collectable.

>>96834488 (OP)
Bughouse > Crazyhouse > Chess960 > Shogi > Chess

>>96835429
This is just worse Onitama

>>96834488 (OP)
Here's a real answer. Things like Chess960 were invented to solve a preparation problem that only effects a tiny portion of the chess playing population. Your average chess player with sub 1800 ELO isn't affected by the crisis of memorization or preparation. Your average Joe Shmo 1300 ELO chesslet doesn't play at a high enough level to encounter chess' problems, and most likely never will. But this is the guy you need to convince to pick up shogi.

Shogi on the otherhand has all sorts of problems, the first and foremost being the fact that all the pieces are in moon runes. The second being the complete lack of community or learning resources. The community that does exist around Shogi is also adamantly against westernization of the game, even though its westerners they're trying to get to play the game. They unironically want you to learn kanji and Japanese phrases for ideas that already have English language equivalents.

>>96834523
I feel like chess does take some amount of actual wit, but that the primary skill needed to be good at chess is memorization. No amount of playing and practicing chess will amount to the amount of knowledge and progress you acquire by studying and memorizing openings, board positions, etc.

>>96834488 (OP)
Because it's almost impossible to draw in shogi, it's either win or lose.

>>96834488 (OP)
Mostly due to the fact people don't learn how to play shogi and the idea that "Chess" is a nobleman/intelligential game. In Japan that's Shogi and Go. however Western nations that tends to be just chess sometimes Poker/Blackjack.

>>96835615
Memorization really only matters for the top 1% of chess players because those fractions of a pawn that is fought over in the opening matters. The tiniest edge can be nursed for the rest of the game. But for the other 99% of players memorization is a waste of time. That +0.5 advantage gained in the opening will be lost, the game increases in difficulty as pieces get traded off. The endgame is the most difficult phase of the game, that is where true chess skill lies and that can't be memorized, it's always different. Many games have completely equal positions 50 moves in, but one player is able to outplay the other and win. It is the difficulty in endgames that makes chess great. For 99% of players being slightly better or worse after the opening is meaningless. If a player plays nonsense openings like the bongcloud or whatever BS he makes up, it only costs him 200 elo of strength.

>>96835615
IIRC a fair amount of research has been done on correlation between chess and intelligence (as measured by intelligence tests, which of course may not and probably don´t measure every aspect of intelligence), with said research pretty consistently showing that there´s IQ correlates with chess performance for beginners but not for experienced players. For experienced players, the amount of practice is the best predictor of performance. I´m not going to bother to look any of this up to see if I remember it right, though, so take this with a grain of salt.

>>96834488 (OP)
>half of the game being a memory puzzle
this instantly outs you as a retard that knows nothing about chess, just because the top 0.000000001% of players complain about heavy memorization doesn't mean it's an issue for anyone else

>>96835568
It's really no different from learning what icons/symbols mean in other games, or what the community terminology is in any given game. Cope.

>>96837301
>cope
People don't care about shogi.

>>96836584
>smarter people are better at simple games
shocker

>>96834488 (OP)

Shogi can never become as popular as chess because the pieces don't look remotely as cool

Popularity is 99% aesthetics 1% mechanics

>>96837454
The post you're replying to very clearly says that smarter people aren't better at chess, except when we're talking about beginners ie. when amount of practice isn't a distinguishing factor between players.

>>96836584
>IQ correlates with chess performance for beginners but not for experienced players
That's true for litterly everything.

>>96834523
Based
Big chess doesn't want you to know this stuff
Play onitama and you'll wake up

Once you start playing connection style abstracts (Go, Hex, Twixt, Lines of Action) you realise how brainlet chess-style games really are.

>>96838019
Abstract games will never be as popular

>>96834523
>my friends only know how to play chess they don't want to learn another game
DnD vibes. Hasbro should buy Chess.

>>96835429
The whole point of chess (and every other similar game) is that every set is the same as any other. Making it collectible and therefore P2W just means that you can't just pick up a set and play.
Imagine always having to carry your chess pieces with you instead of just using the set owned by your friend/the bar/the tournament. And also having to keep paying money for better pieces. That's not chess; that's Warhammer.

>>96837301
It's a lot easier to learn the difference between the horse pieces and the buttplug piece than it is to learn the difference between two arbitrary Chinese characters for a person that can't read Chinese/Kanji. It's a lot easier to learn the difference between "internal rook" and "external rook" than between "shikenbisha" and "sankenbisha," especially when you're already juggling fifty other random combinations of syllables.

>>96835383
This. It never caught on because shogi players don’t want it to catch on.

>>96838180
That reminds me of the time someone suggested a variant that "solved" openings by introducing gambling. The players may be nofun but sometimes you have people miss the point like this.
>>96836550
I'm doubtful of the "1%" number. My impression is you're expected to know openings even in intermediate play, only a very casual player wouldn't run into it.

>>96835372
Are you seriously trying to argue rn that flaws don't matter as a broad statement?

>>96839210
Are you seriously ESL enough that that's what you took from that statement?

>>96835383
This. I wish shogi was remade in a functional to the west form.
I have suffered the exact same shit with getting people to play mahjong, then one day i took a couple of old playing cards printed some card sized stickers and made it into a card game
After all thats what it is, and then suddenly i got a couple of people to try it

>>96835429
this game is awesome. You can play it against an AI here.
http://mrraow.com/index.php/aiai-home/aiai/

>>96834488 (OP)
it's asian

>>96834523
Just play Kill Team

>>96834488 (OP)
Shogi is just a shittier version of crazyhouse. A much shittier version.

>>96834488 (OP)
I agree that Shogi is a better game than Chess, but I'll also argue that Sittuyin is a better game than Shogi. It's not perfect but I wouldn't change much about it.

>>96834488 (OP)
Chink, gook and ladyboy chess are all better than both

>>96835083
NTA but,
Yes, precisely, and I'm sick of it. It's like 2 party countries, but their upfront about them being one party behind closed doors. You can't bring up board games without half the people you talk to getting stuck on
>board games = chess
just like you can't talk about TTRPGs without half the people you're speaking to thinking
>TTRPG = D&D
I want to be free to have a world of many popular game archetypes that are understood to be separate by the wider whole, but that's not happening for a long time yet so my only choice is to do what I can and live life.

>>96837301
>Board full of chink runes facing different directions is the same as "the horsie is the knight, the pointy boy is the bishop"

Uh-huh. How's that argument working out for you?

>>96835383
Insisting they must be called gote and sente is silly but black and white is just as silly when none of the pieces are black or white.

Agree that online platforms could/should easily offer symbolized pieces.

>>96841624
For chess players, the terms white and black are pretty much synonyms for player 1 player 2 the way that sente and gote are in shogi. So for that particular group of people it isn't too silly to carry over the pre-existing terminology to shogi. I do agree that for non-chess players who play shogi just saying "player 1 player 2" would probably be better.

>>96841655
The problem is for some bizarre reason shogi literature in English sometimes *does* use black and white but the other way round. The app I have on my phone uses black for player 1.

First player and second player seems the best option given thats pretty much the translation.

>>96841676
They're most likely backwards because in Go, black is sente and white is gote.

>>96841682
Yeah that makes sense I did always wonder

>>96839267
More pieces need to be renamed in my opinion. We already agreed to change the name of the bishop, knight, rook, lance, and pawns to suit the palates of wypipo. Dragon Horse and Dragon King? Ridiculous. Call the one the bishop turns into the Cardinal or the Archbishop, and the one the rook turns into the Castle or Citadel or some shit. While we're at it, rename the gold and silver generals. When I teach people Shogi, the number one issue they have is memorizing which general is which, and how they move. I've thought about the names "priest" and "watchtower" for them to at least help players remember that their movement is similar to a gimped bishop and rook.

>>96842126
>gold and silver generals
General and capitan

>>96834523
Some of my favorite chess variants include "super x chess" where you can combine pieces and "ChessCraft" which is a more open ended variant that let's you make and customize your own board and pieces. Other honorable mentions include Chess 2: the sequel (also known as Sirlin chess), knightmare chess (a chess variant that uses cards to change the board, pieces and rules), spartan chess, and chess evolved online.

There are lots of fairy chess variants out there but like you said most people dont play for fun they play for prestige and one-upmanship. But there is lots of room for creativity in chess, just not a lot of interest. Even something as minimal Fischer random chess doesn't have much popularity.

>>96835568
>Shogi on the otherhand has all sorts of problems, the first and foremost being the fact that all the pieces are in moon runes.
The Japanese already solved that problem.

>>96834488 (OP)
Same reason that soccer is more popular than baseball.
Chess has two unintuitive rules, en passant and castling. It's the lowest common denominator amongst all variants.

Also in countries where Go exists their regional chess variants are considered to be less prestigious games.

>>96835429
This game was pretty fun but yeah the best way to kill your game is to make it have collectable pieces.

>>96834488 (OP)
Just tried it and didn’t like it. Why is it so shit? All the pieces are in the exact same shape with only marginal differences in size. Notice it calls the sides white and black despite there being no difference in color between the two. I can’t read chink to tell the pieces apart but even if I could, that’s a lame way to distinguish them. Imagine if every chess piece was just a square with just a Q, K, N, P, B, or R on it. Very soulless.

>>96848391
I like to think many JP had the bright idea to make the pieces actually distinct wood carvings like in chess but they basically got shamed into suicide for thinking they were better than the shogi masters of the past for having the gall to think they could improve the game.

>>96836081
You've just sold me on shogi.
Stalemate is the stupidest draw condition ever conceived by man.
>I am immobilised, making me the victor!

>>96834488 (OP)
the pieces honestly both in appearance and name, people see a bunch of samey looking pentagons with some moonspeak on them and immediately stop caring about that silly game they play on some island. the best they could come up with for international appeal is swap out the kanji for an pictograph of a similar chess piece.
chess pieces are sexy and simple to understand at a glance no matter what language you speak white horse, black horse, white castle, black castle ect, with shogi it's some kanji representing super alloy flying dragon general dickfucker of the west, and then the same exact kanji but upside down.
the issue of capturing your opponents pieces makes it so that there's no real way to have nice looking chess pieces for shogi without making unappealing compromises.

>>96834488 (OP)
I tried to get into Shogi but the pieces are normally only discriminated by their chinkrunes. I am a filthy gweilo and can't memorize 15 different chinkrunes and remember which piece corresponds to it and what its properties are

>>96849308
>there's no real way to have nice looking chess pieces for shogi without making unappealing compromises
You could keep the pointy shape and replace the kanji with a nice little painting. Is that an unappealing compromise?

I already hate chess. Playing a more complicated version wouldn't have any appeal, and I suspect it's that way for a lot of people who already see shogi as "Chess but weeaboo".

Why play chess when Enochian Chess exists?

>>96835429
>It was called Navia Drapt.
Dratp actually. The objective of the game was to dratp your navia. Very intuitive!

>>96849149
Stalemate was invented by a British chess gambler who wanted to be able to play for a draw im lost positions.

Intuitively a stalemate is just another zugzwan. Should we outlaw zugzwan because nobody should be forced to play a move that will eventually lead to checkmate in 1 or 2 or 3 moves? Then why is it permissible to call zugzwan that leads to mate a draw?

>>96848391
It looks like it plays like a slower version of bug house chess with bunch of pointless pieces whose moves only slightly differ.

>>96839166
>I'm doubtful of the "1%" number. My impression is you're expected to know openings even in intermediate play, only a very casual player wouldn't run into it.
A lot of intermediate players think so, but if you are one you're much better off practicing tactics than memorizing openings 10+ moves deep.

>>96849149
More like
>if you can't convert a won position into a checkmate, you don't deserve a full point

>>96834488 (OP)
>Chess
:|
>Chess, Japan
:O

>>96850432
The Lance is such a shitty piece

>>96850432
>pawn, Lance, knight, and silver all promote to the same piece
For what purpose!?!?

>>96850432
>

>>96850432
>Gold General moves are worse than Silver General
>Bishop only plays in half of the board
>Knight nerfed to death, might as well just call it Horse
>Lance
>those promotions
>no Queen
Yikes

>>96844721
>most people dont play for fun they play for prestige and one-upmanship
I don't think that's it. I think it's more that learning chess is hard enough as is, and people don't want to commit to the mental load of learning another game of equal or greater complexity.
Whether or not those other games are actually equally or more complex is irrelevant; the subjective experience is what drives decisions.

>>96850319
People would need 3 friends first

>>96848656
They are tiles because you turn them over to promote, good luck doing that with a carving of a horse.

>>96850644
Gold General is actually a major piece since it can induce checkmate by itself. For real, a lot of newbies get filtered by a well dropped Goldie.

>>96835568
>>96841615
>>96848391
>>96849308
The pieces are the biggest problem with this game. I even got to a point where I could actually remember a few of the kanji, but when you play an actual game and there's 40 pieces with Kanji on them, and some are upside down, its impossible. Its like staring at a test that you know you can't pass.
And if you find shogi forums, the fuckers LIKE the kanji and think YOU'RE playing the game wrong if you want to use different game pieces. But okay, you say fuck em and you find pieces you like that are free from nip letters. Guess what? All the fucking learning resources use the pieces with kanji! You literally can't fucking win with this shit. The youtubers, the books, all kanji. There's so many barriers between you and Shogi you might as well just go play bughouse.

>>96852705
I'm pro having symbolic graphics for westerners but you are making it sound so much harder than it actually is. Its recognising about 12 symbols, its not a herculean effort.

Numerous apps will let you play without kanji too (they just use letters and it looks retarded).

>>96853080
its 15 symbols on 40 pieces facing different directions and mixed together because of how dropping affects the board state. Responses like yours are part of the problem.
>Its not a big deal.
You literally can't play the game until you do this. Your faction needs to get that part through your head - why would I put the effort into learning half an alphabet worth of kanji when I could just play a chess variant that people actually play?

>>96853253
Its considerably less hard than learning how to play the game. If you're already willing to commit enough time and effort to do that, remembering a few symbols is really not that difficult.

The ideal solution is something like this picture, but in learning to play like that you're cutting yourself off from ~99% of the player base. Should online shogi apps offer this? Yes imo, but given that they're all run by Japanese people who don't really care if you learn to play or not, its unlikely that they'll bother.

>>96853315
Yeah but your argument is assuming that people have autismed themselves into wanting to play shogi before they know anything about it. And its still a bad argument. You can't just say "Its not that hard", "Its not that big a deal" When obviously it is that hard and it is a big deal to the majority of people who take a look at shogi and pass on it.
I don't know where the cognitive disconnect is here; you can't ignore the number one complaint people make about your game, and then wonder why no one wants to play it. Like, meme chess variants have more players than shogi in the west. At what point of continued irrelevance do you stop and go, "weelll shyyoot, maybe I AM wrong about all this."

>>96836103
Is english your third language?

>>96853374
I've said multiple times that there should be an option on online servers to display westernised pieces. I am very much pro that. You're making up an argument that isn't there.

I am simply saying that making it out to be some sort of arduous task is silly, especially when most people will be learning on an app which shows you the moves of each piece when you click it.

Lishogi has a westernized piece option and English learning materials if anyone genuinely wants to learn but is put off by having to remember things.

>>96834488 (OP)
>How come Shogi hasn't become more popular in the West when it's quite literally Chess but better
lol. Shogi is like 2/3 of chess. Chess is opening -> middlegame -> endgame. Since in shogi pieces cannot die, it's eternal middlegame. (Also, the game that ends with draw because two armies somehow missed each other is kinda silly.)
>debuff
How about fuck off to /v/?
>Two of the most boring aspects of chess are the fixed start
Anon, was our brain was rewired by tiktok and you cannot focus on something that lasts more than 10 seconds? Sounds like a (You) problem.
>Fischer Random
If shogi consists of beginning and middlegame then Chess959 consists of middlegame and endgame and brings absolutely nothing new to the game. (Besides Caruana already began developing the opening theory for 959 starting positions.)

>>96850544
kek

>>96853654
>westernized
Yeah they cant just call it generalized or pictorial it has to be evil gaijin Westerners destroying muh culture! Why the Japanese are so insistent on making their chess equivalent as unappealing as possible is baffling.

Chess originally came from india. Imagine if the only way to play chess was using flat square pieces (all the same color) with the names of the piece written in sanskrit.

>>96854387
How would you design shogi pieces when they have to be useable by both players and promote to a different piece? Not the symbol, the shape and colour.

>>96852705
i feel like even jap players have gotten fucked a few times by misreading the board at some point because of how little visual distinction there is between pieces. you have to be a lot more careful at not blundering from a simple mistake when a game looks like this.

>>96855228
the most interesting idea i've seen is a piece that's black on one side, and white on the other, each player from their perspective would see the same thing color wise. where they're both white against black or both black against white.

>>96855228
>>96855440
Can't you just have a few extra pieces for each side? Like, what's the maximum amount of pieces I can capture for each type?

>>96855529
That would require you to have basically 4 sets, which isn't crazy desu, lots of people have more than one chess set

>>96855440
This is neat, I wonder if some design boffin could make shapes that stand upside down too and look sufficiently different in that orientation.

>>96855529
>17 promoting and captureable pieces
>2 non-promoting but captureable
>1 non-promoting, non-captureable
>2 colours
>((17 * 2 * 2) + (2 * 2) + 1) * 2 = 146
Maximum 146 pieces needed in theory if you don't share colour/promotions. In practice you'd never need that many in a single game but the problem is you don't know which ones you'd need.

>>96855440
Might as well make them from translucent plastic with and LED that can change color inside of it

>>96855583
it's a lot of extra pieces and having to keep track of what pieces your opponent can actually put on the board so they don't cheat you.
>>96855762
i think there's something nice about a solution that requires no electricity or programming. just wood. the promotions are also handled by placing the piece on a round puck.

>>96856119
>i think there's something nice about a solution that requires no electricity or programming. just wood. the promotions are also handled by placing the piece on a round puck.
Solar panel board. Pieces charge when in contact with the board. Also motivates grass-touching

>>96835383
>> Please no westernizing the pieces, its an insult to Nihon.
But they have already been Westernised by no one other than one of our many wise and beautiful nihonjinnoonna. She used pretty colours and kawaii animals for your baby brain. Now you are happy akachan?

>>96835383
You can't have black and white when you reuse the pieces you capture

>>96834488 (OP)
While I can't tell shogi better than chess or not I can tell that this works similar as everything else in this world:
1) You not necessarily need to bring/create better stuff than others if you make a great deal that your product/technology getting to most shelves and what people actually buy.
2) Similar to ccg/tcg players. Dont matter if there was a much better card game before which died. people crazy about what currently popular. Few might try previous or long forgotten gems, but most wont.
See how role playing games went from small to big over decades. Shogi or Go could gain much more popularity but lot of things would need for that on a long run. Probably not the era of the mobile phones is the best to gain more popularity.

>>96841676
>The app I have on my phone uses black for player 1.
That is correct and has been the case since he early days of shogi.

In chess it has less than 140 years since "white moves first" became a formal rule. Before that players could move first more or less randomly without regard for colour and it would be common for players to alternate first move. The only difference is that the order of chess pieces are mirror images and that's only due to the queen and king. In shogi there aren't even colours for pieces and the layout is rotationally symmetrical, bishop always starts on the player's left, so it makes literally no difference, there is just the usual first player advantage.

In chess maybe it makes some tiny difference because a queen's pawn move for example would be to the left or right depending on the colour starting. You'd have to process the opening game as mirror image and that extra layer of cognition might confuse your hyperspecialised opening game memory.

>>96855398
>i feel like

>>96835429
>Navia Drapt
Your mispelling just proves that along with the poor marketing strategy of a collectible piece game, making names unpronounceable in both the country of origin and in English is a great way to get it dismissed. They didn't stop with the game name, they kept up the stupid word trend with gyullas and maseitai as important game ideas and pieces were named like Billpentod, Krra, and Coydrocomp. There were ordinary names like Estelle, Moses, and Schmidt. There were portmanteau based on Babylonian/Sumerian, Greek and Sanskrit like Nergalgamesh, Ghoramedusa, and Chakrabat. It's an okay game, not great, but it was a nightmare to get pieces when it was new and in production.