Shogi · Japanese chess · on your phone
A room for shogi.
Ranked games at two speeds. Friends by code. Mino AI, our own human-like engine, at levels 1 to 8, and a calculating engine from 9 to 12. The day’s tsume. And a review of every game, at the same table you played it on.
A real capture from the current build: a game against the bot, two pawns in hand.
After the game · 感想戦
Study it together.
In shogi a game is not finished when it ends. Both players go back over it together, move by move; the custom is called kansōsen. Here the room stays open for exactly that: one shared board, arrows in your own colour, the engine’s line for the position in front of you, and the same chat you had during the game.
Then one tap for a rematch, colours swapped.
The vermilion arrow is yours, the tea-green one is theirs. Turning the page clears them, like a real board.
Puzzles
One tsume a day, and a ladder to climb.
Tsume are mate problems, the traditional way: your pieces, the defender’s king, and every other piece in the defender’s hand. One arrives each day. Under it, mates lifted from real games at your puzzle rating, where more than one move may work and pieces may be left over, because that is how it is over the board.
A ladder runs from mate in one upward. Two hundred attempts at ninety percent first-try accuracy move you up; a hint or a wrong first move counts as a miss.
Every game, reviewed
Where it turned.
Every game you play is kept and analysed on the phone. The line under the board is the evaluation move by move; the dots mark the moments the game turned. Drag across it to land on any position, then try a better move against the bot from right there.
Then Mino reads the same moves again, and answers the question a search cannot: would a player of your strength have played that? A move that cost you the game and that almost everyone at your level plays is a lesson. The same move, played by nobody at your level, is a one-off. Each turning point also shows what players around 1000, 1400, 1700 and 2000 would have played instead.
The line up close: above the middle is good for you; the dots are the moments the game turned, each with a note on what was better.
Friends and a word at the table
A code, a link, a game.
Create a room and read the six characters out, or send the link. The game starts when your friend arrives. Chat has stamps, a few phrases, and a line of text; report and block are one tap away, and you can switch chat off altogether.
Opponents · ミノAI
An opponent that plays like a person.
Most computer opponents are a very strong engine told to make mistakes. They play twenty flawless moves, hang a piece for no reason, then go back to playing flawlessly. Nobody plays like that, so there is nothing in it to learn from.
Mino is our own, trained on millions of positions from rated human games played on lishogi.org, to learn what players at each strength actually choose. Every move it makes is a move people make. The weakest opponent is not a random one, it is a plausible one.
Named for the 美濃囲い, the first castle most players learn to build. How Mino AI works →
Learn
Lessons played, not read.
Ten lessons on the board itself: how each piece moves, what a drop is, why promotion matters, and how to build your first castle, the Mino. Every step is a move you make, and an arrow shows where the piece goes.
Not sure what a piece does yet? Switch the faces to Guide and every piece carries its own moves as dots, or to Initial for kanji with a letter. Notation can be Western or Japanese, and the signage can read in English.
New to shogi?
Chess, as it grew up in Japan.
A 9×9 board and twenty pieces a side. Pieces promote when they cross into the far third. And one rule that changes everything: a piece you capture becomes yours, and on a later turn you may drop it back onto the board.
The app teaches the pieces and your first castle inside the game. Start with how to play, the pieces and the castles; today’s tsume is playable here too.
Get the app
Free on Android and iPhone.
Shogi Castle is free on Google Play and the App Store, for phones and tablets. No account needed to start.
Google PlayFree downloadApp StoreFree download
Free to play, in English, Japanese and Turkish. No account needed to start; a Google or Apple sign-in later keeps your rank and games when you change phones.