Internationalized Shogi Pieces

I'll post the most famous internationalized sets here. Use this topic to ask questions or make comments on all internationalized pieces. As for our forum, HIDETCHI's pieces are the official pieces.

HIDETCHI Pieces



PlayOK Pieces



Elephant Chess Club Pieces



Circular Pieces

ah yes good old international pieces
i find it more fun to play with them but i have a proper board and pieces at home though

I guess these aren't really internationalized, but I prefer them for teaching. Rather than replacing traditional koma, they merely ease the transition. I got them at the NSR in Sendagaya this summer and I don't know how I taught people without them!

I've seen those pieces! There are several sets of them on ebay. Unfortunately, the price is upwards of $70, which I don't think I'm entirely willing to pay over the internet for something like this.

I want those very, very much! I remember first finding them immediately after my first shogi event and wishing I had had them. I think I spent a collective 20 minutes at my event reminding people which pieces were what and how they could move. This would make that so much easier.

Do you know if there's a place where I could order them for less than $70?

I have no idea if they ship to the USA, but here is the listing on the NSR site; the cost is about $35.

http://www.rakuten.co.jp/shogi/367649/462077/1788489/

Thanks for the link, I'll be sure to check it out.

I had a new idea for internationalized pieces, especially regarding Hidetchi's set, should they ever get published into real pieces. How about writing the name in Japanese on the bottom of the piece? I drew a quick sketch to show what it might look like:



(Sorry my kanji writing isn't so great. ^^; )

But this way, they would recognize the pieces by the picture, but they would also be able to get used to the Japanese name as they play more and more games.

Love it. Nice art. It's a great idea, it gets people interested in Japanese (if they weren't already) and is a nice touch to remind people that it is a Japanese game. It also serves as a reference (as you said) for when they have to see the pieces with the kanji.

Hidetchi-san. Just an idea, maybe it's a good idea to change some part of the Nari-Silver to be different from the Gold aside from the red color. In the Japanese piece set, the 2 dots on the cursive Gold is connected.

Maybe you can switch the center part (the 2 loops of the Gold) into the center of the Silver?

Or I still think that you should make the Silver with a Gold Crown on top of a Silver Crown, just like all the other promoted pieces for the very reason that promoted Silver right now is NOT synchronized with the other promoted Minor Pieces. It's the only one promoted Minor Piece that does not have a Gold CROWN but an entire Gold, and the entire ORIGINAL SILVER is missing.

It can be very easily mistaken that the promoted Silver is actually a promoted Gold because new players may forget the fact that Gold doesn't promote, and they can very often mix up the Gold and the Silver.

To be fair, it does look rather silly for a man to be wearing two crowns at the same time.

Well true, but unity + less confusion > "looks kinda dumb" in my opinion. Just speaking my opinion, that's all.

Also, this is partly why I want to test these designs before we make a definite decision on which designs are finalized. Instead of saying "New players may think this" or "New players may think that," we should see what new players actually do.

Well, maybe at least change the center part? Because that does look like a promoted Gold over a promoted Silver.

OK, I agree with both of you, 1059860 and hirohiigo.

First of all, I agree with 1059860 in saying "promoted Silver right now is NOT synchronized with the other promoted Minor Pieces", because that's actually what I don't like mostly about my pieces either. That's why I showed the crown-on-crown piece in my video first.
However I didn't choose crown-on-crown, because I also agree with hirohiigo in saying "silly for a man to be wearing two crowns".
The silver showing it's movement is another problem for doing that, because if we see two crowns, both movements are shown, and that's something a bit silly too.
But once again I agree with 1059860 that 'less confusing' and 'unity' are also as important as 'not being silly'. So here's my conclusion.

Obviously, we need to meet these three requirements:
A: not looking silly
B: unity
C: not confusing

Because of A, we don't adopt gold crown on top of silver crown, WHICH will inevitably undermine B.
But let's consider it this way.
I think a complete unity in promoted minor pieces is not a must, because, we can think of Silver to be not same as other minor pieces.
Well, he's a GENERAL! Clearly, it's specially higher ranked than lances, knights and pawns. (and I believe that's how Japanese player think when seeing Kanji pieces too)
So we can give silver's promotion a different meaning, a general becoming an even more powerful general, kind of a special promotion, which can loosen the restricion of B on us.
Thus, what we should be doing is to find a way to meet the requirement C without making it look silly,
which makes me now interested in 1059860's idea of 'changing the center'.
But the problem is I don't quite understand what you mean by that. :-)
So could you explain that part again so I can understand? (I couldn't understand what you mean by '2 loops'...)

hirohiigo wrote:I think I spent a collective 20 minutes at my event reminding people which pieces were what and how they could move. This would make that so much easier.

we use papers with kanji of pieces written on them and how the pieces move. Also some verbal hints about pieces, like knight can jump over other pieces, you cant mate a king with a pawn drop etc... If people forget in their first-second game how do those pieces move, they can check it whenever they need on those papers. After two games they usually don't need to check the movement of pieces, the only problematic pieces are gold and silver, they are very often mistaken. But people still can check them with the paper. Those papers are in plastic sheet to prevent damage and we use them several times. For a presentation there are about 5 papers needed.

It's in Slovak language, but still, you can check at least how does it look at following link:
http://moje.shogi.sk/files/download/docs/set_help_nsr.pdf

All right, anyway, I've came up with some ideas.



How about these?
I like A better.

The basic concepts are:
- keep the original items of silver (i.e. three spikes and two ribbons)
- describe gold's movement (add other items if necessary)

Hidetchi wrote:All right, anyway, I've came up with some ideas.



How about these?
I like A better.

The basic concepts are:
- keep the original items of silver (i.e. three spikes and two ribbons)
- describe gold's movement (add other items if necessary)

I think A version is a bit better. I wonder, if so much effort was put into other internationalized piece sets as well.. There might be a chance of using these pieces of yours as standardized internationalized piece set. However, I find original pieces(with kanji) better, because there is a feeling of tradition about them.

Oh I rather like Promoted Silver (A) - it simply adds the gold's jewel to the silver's crown, and still gives all the right movements. This is great - it also reminds me of the cursive of 金 on Japanese sets.

@Lukas1: That's a great reference sheet! I should use something like that next time. For some reason, the people at my panel weren't able to make a connection between the characters on the sheet and the reference sheet...

A is amazing. I think you should replace that with the current red Gold

hirohiigo wrote:Oh I rather like Promoted Silver (A) - it simply adds the gold's jewel to the silver's crown, and still gives all the right movements. This is great - it also reminds me of the cursive of 金 on Japanese sets.

@Lukas1: That's a great reference sheet! I should use something like that next time. For some reason, the people at my panel weren't able to make a connection between the characters on the sheet and the reference sheet...

well kanji on our reference sheet is exactly the same as the kanji on pieces we use. I mean, the kanji on our pieces is exactly the same, the same style...

OK, I'll change the promoted silver of my pieces to the new (A).
I'll make it nicer than the sample above.

If we are to implement the drawing to 'real' pieces, I think I'll have to make those drawing with 'path-data', (or 'vector-data'? I guess that's how you call them) so that you can implement the drawing clearly on pieces of any size.

@1059860: Yeah, I knew who you are, but I didn't know how I should be calling you in this forum. Why is it that your ID here is just a series of numbers?

@ Hidetchi-san: Call me 105 or xDAZZE or William is all fine. By the way, is there any way to impliment a final version of your International Pieces into BCMShogi once you upload the final version of it?

@xDAZZE: Of course you can easily replace the piece set in BCM. I'll upload the graphic file, and you have only to overwrite the file in BCM with the uploaded one. The file is in,
"BCMShogi" -> "Theme" -> "HIDETCHI" -> "Pieces_Hidetchi_International.pgn"

Right now, I'm re-making the pieces with much clearer path-data. (just as below) So wait for a while...

I'm going to probably make a few game-play videos with the International pieces after you get the entire new pieces with the clearer path-data and update the +S.

OK. Here's the path-data version.
Replace it with the file in your BCM-Shogi folder.