Drops · 持ち駒
Captured pieces come back.
In chess a captured piece leaves the game. In shogi it changes sides: it waits in your hand, and on any turn you may put it down on an empty square as your own move. Everything that makes shogi feel different follows from this one rule.
The rule
When you capture, the piece goes to your hand, mochigoma (持ち駒), face up on the stand beside the board so both players can see it. On any later turn, instead of moving a piece on the board, you may drop one from your hand onto any empty square. That is your whole move. The dropped piece points your way and is unpromoted, whatever it was when captured: a promoted rook comes back as a plain rook.
A drop cannot capture (the square must be empty) and cannot promote on arrival, even inside the promotion zone. It can give check, and it can block a check against you. From then on the piece is an ordinary piece: it moves, captures and promotes like the rest.
Four squares you may not use
1. No second pawn on a file 二歩 nifu
You may not drop a pawn onto a file where you already have an unpromoted pawn. A promoted pawn does not count, so once your pawn has become a tokin the file is open again. Over a real board this is the most common way to lose a game by illegal move, and for good reason: pawns are what you have most of in hand.
2. Nowhere a piece could never move
A pawn or a lance may not be dropped on the last rank, and a knight may not be dropped on the last two: from there they would have no legal move for the rest of the game. Every other piece may be dropped on any empty square.
3. No checkmate by dropping a pawn 打ち歩詰め uchifuzume
You may not give checkmate by dropping a pawn. Dropping a pawn to give check is fine, and mating by moving a pawn one square forward is fine too; the rule is only about the drop that ends the game. It is old, it is odd, and it comes up more than you would think in the endgame, where a pawn in hand is often the last piece left to attack with.
4. Nothing that leaves your king in check
As with any move. A drop can block a check, and often that is the best way to answer one, but it cannot ignore one.
Why it changes everything
- Material never runs out. Trading pieces does not simplify the game, it arms both sides. There is no grinding down to a bare king; games end in attacks on the king.
- The king needs a house. Because pieces can appear anywhere, a king in the open is never safe. Hence castles, and hence the shogi habit of spending the first ten moves building one.
- A pawn in hand is worth a lot. Dropped in front of a piece, it attacks it; dropped behind a piece, it threatens to promote; dropped in a line, it blocks. The proverb says a single pawn is worth a thousand gold.
- Defence is cheap, attack is dear. A defender can drop a piece exactly where the attack lands. Attackers learn to spend pieces so that the drops the defender makes are the wrong ones.
Try a drop.
The app’s lesson on drops hands you a gold and lets you put it anywhere. Then the bot will show you what a pawn in hand can do.