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 close it. They never got as far as the rules.

The kanji on the pieces are the wall. So before the design story, here is 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 makes fourteen distinct things to tell apart by character alone. Chess gives every piece its own shape, so “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, the same few things will trip you up every time.

The gold general. It moves one step in any orthogonal direction plus the two forward diagonals: six squares, with 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 general. One square straight forward, or one square in any diagonal, five squares in all. 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 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. Once either one advances, it does not come back.

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

Drops. When you capture a piece it joins your hand, and you can later place it (drop it) onto any empty square as your whole move, where it fights 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). Drops are also the reason a shogi engine’s evaluation swings harder than a chess engine’s.

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 to 9 right-to-left from Black’s side, and 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 to i for ranks: P-7f is a pawn to the 7th file, 6th rank.
• Hosking uses numbers 1 to 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.

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: 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.) To see it in use, the beginner’s guide to shogi openings writes out two opening lines in this notation.

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

Everything above is 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.

Why can’t shogi simply draw a knight as a horse the way chess does? Because the piece design carries the rules. All forty pieces are one shape and one colour, and ownership is shown by which way the wedge points, since that has to survive the drop rule: a captured piece joins your hand and comes back fighting for you. Fixed colours would show the wrong owner, and a wedge that turns around 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 changes the piece’s state and keeps the piece. It is a compact system if you read the characters, and a field of identical wedges if you don’t.

A board you can actually read needs three things:

Identity: a distinct symbol per piece that you can read at a glance. This is the easy part, and where most sets stop.

Movement, which matters most. A newcomer doesn’t know that a lance only goes forward, that a knight has exactly two destination squares, or that a silver can’t step sideways. Shogiful’s International style keeps the kanji and adds arrows showing where each piece can move, so the piece teaches its own legal moves. That pays off most with the gold family, where promoted silver, knight, lance, and pawn all move alike, and the arrows show the resemblance so you don’t memorise four separate facts.

Promotion state. Traditional sets flip to red characters. A kanji-free set needs a change just as hard to miss, more than a tint, because “did that silver promote?” is the question you can’t afford to get wrong when you’re working out whether it can retreat.

Then there is the choice itself. Shogiful offers three piece styles: Traditional (kanji on wooden tiles), International (kanji with movement arrows), and Chess (chess-style icons with no kanji). The international first-launch flow asks a new player to pick one before they know which they need, so the choice stays open: Settings → Appearance switches style at any time, and moves can be shown in Western (P-7f) or Japanese notation.

Learn the pieces first, the kanji second

There is a real trade-off: the wider shogi world runs on kanji. Books, problem collections, Japanese apps, real boards and every diagram on every shogi site use kanji. A player who stays on kanji-free pieces forever has a ceiling on what they can read.

So the kanji-free style is meant as a starting point. The International style is the bridge: the character sits on every piece while the arrows tell you how it moves, so you read 銀 every turn without needing to know it yet, and you switch to the Traditional set when the arrows stop being necessary. You meet 銀 after you already know how a silver behaves, which is much easier than learning symbol and behaviour at once. Nobody learns chess by memorising the letters K, Q, R, B, N before their first game, yet shogi outside Japan has effectively demanded the equivalent for decades and then wondered why the game doesn’t travel.

A board you can read on move one

The readable board is the front door. Behind it is the reason Shogiful exists: every game analysed on-device by YaneuraOu, an open-source shogi engine, with each mistake explained on a card (the missed knight-drop fork, the edge pawn that cracked your castle) and daily training built around the weakness your games show most. None of that coaching reaches a player who bounced off the board on day one, so every other feature depends on the piece set.

If you want ranked play against humans, the online platforms are the right tools, though the board there is all kanji, the 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, see our guide to the best shogi apps for iPhone.

Shogiful itself is on the App Store for iPhone, iPad, and Mac. It is free to download with daily limits on analysis and training, and Premium is $1.99/month, $9.99/year, or $19.99 once. The app page has the methodology, a comparison with the online platforms, and six worked examples of what a plain-language shogi mistake looks like.