Talk:Chu shogi

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[edit] Tables

While this article is outstanding, its old-style HTML tables are completely unreadable, to the point of being a barrier to further editing. Let this be a lesson on the judicious use of whitespace. --Ardonik.talk()* July 3, 2005 10:48 (UTC)

Hi. Thanks for your interest. I am not much of a writer, but I felt tables were the best way to demonstrate the piece movements. I didn't want to make up a bunch of graphics. Is there a more appropriate way of doing it? --Sivak. July 4, 2005 2:01 (UTC)
The tables seem fine to me.
Notice you're missing a few pronunciations. Are you just missing vowel length? The only possibility for 盲虎 "moko" in standard Japanese is mouko (from mauko); for 猛豹 "mohyo" is mouhyou (from mauheu), etc. However, others are wrong: 将 can only be shou in any of its compounds, I believe. (Well, there's always the possibility of ideosyncratic pronunciations, but that's doubtful.)
Well, a lot of these Romaji I am getting from Jim Breen's site. I have a hard time reading Hiragana, so I only did a few for the initial release. I intended to add the others later. I don't speak Japanese and only know Katakana a few Kanji (mainly for fun). It was hard to get some of them for this article. If you want to contribute, feel free. --Sivak 21:06, 13 July 2005 (UTC)
Of course, this is assuming that Roger Hare's got the basics right, because there are other possibilities if you let the vowels vary (*myouku for 盲虎, etc.). Easiest just to lift the pronunciations from the Japanese Wikipedia.
Anyway, I'll add these in. kwami 20:02, 13 July 2005 (UTC)
Weird - Japanese Wikipedia got one wrong, or so it appears. 歩兵 has two pronunciations: hohei (infantry, foot soldier), and fuhyou ([shogi] pawn). The abbreviation in shogi is fu, but Japanese Wikipedia has hohei. I'll "correct" the Japanese page and see what happens - meanwhile I'll leave it as fuhyou here. kwami 20:59, 13 July 2005 (UTC)
Well, it's been seven weeks, and my correction to the Japanese site stands, so I'm taking that as confirmation. kwami 07:30, 2005 September 4 (UTC)
Sorry about being anonymous above [correcting now]; I got signed out while doing this. I touched up the article a bit, hopefully for clarity; see what you think. Tenjiku would be a fun article to do too (my favorite variant that I haven't actually played). Last I heard, some of the moves were still debatable in the English-speaking world; it would be fun to check out Japanese Wikipedia. Well, maybe some day. kwami 00:39, 2005 July 14 (UTC)
Hey, I had a quick question about the game and the Taishi (Crown Prince). If you have one of these and it gets put in check, do you have to move it out of check? Same for the king: If you've got the prince and your king is checked, do you need move the king away?
What if your opponent checkmates your king, but not the prince? Can he capture the king on the next move and then have to go after the prince? I've been wondering about this matter and if either piece can be physically removed from the board. --Sivak 05:35, 4 August 2005 (UTC)
As far as I know, there is no rule against capturing kings in shogi. A player will normally concede the game when mated, but if he doesn't, his opponent takes the king like any other piece, and the game is over. In chu, however, the game is on as long as each player has a king, and the prince counts as a king. (Perhaps the prince is assumed to be promoted to king if the king is captured, but I don't believe anyone says that explicitly.)
There's that famous (if perhaps apocryphal) story of the (Western) chess master who told a beginning player that he could queen a pawn into any piece he chose, so of course the student chose to have a second king. The master claims he then won the game by checkmating both kings simultaneously. No such difficulties are entailed by a second king in chu: you simply capture the kings one at a time. And no, I don't believe you have to move a king that's in check, though of course it would be suicide not to do so if you have only one king. But with a prince, you might even sacrifice your king as part of a gambit! kwami 06:08, 2005 August 4 (UTC)
Interesting. Maybe we should add notes about this in the article. I actually realized there is no mention of the Crown Prince acting as a second king. Maybe you could put something together? Lastly, if BOTH pieces are checkmated, does the game end? I know that a resignation is more likely, but it's these little points that interest me.
I hope you like what I've done. I've tried to do my best at both fact-finding and editing. I don't mind the revert, I was just following what I found in Wikipedia:Manual of Style (Japan-related articles). --JTTyler 06:44, 4 September 2005 (UTC)

I assume you mean my reverting the vowels with macrons? I'm not sure what style has to do with it: the macron indicates that the vowel is long in Japanese, and these weren't long vowels. I'll make the corrections in the other variant pages too.

I doubt that double check mate ends the game. Only capturing the last king does. Since you can only capture one piece at a time (unless you're mating with the lion or similar piece), the other escapes, and the game goes on. But even if you checkmated both kings with the lion, so that you could capture both on the next move, it's still the capture that ends the game. kwami 07:27, 2005 September 4 (UTC)

Ah, tenjiku: I don't know if it's as fun as it looks, but it's cool to be able to take out eight pieces at once! kwami 07:40, 2005 September 4 (UTC)

I went and converted the tables from XHTML to the pipeline wiki markup. This aught to make Ardonik and Sivak happier. @u@ Not only does this make things a little easier for the editors, but it also cuts 6KB from the file size. Don’t worry Kwami, all your changes are still there in the new format so you didn’t waste your time. I thought it was a good idea anyway. Maybe we could take a vote. If folks don’t like it, we could always go back to the XHTML. I always did like Sivak’s idea for the tables, and wouldn’t mind seeing them in other shogi variant articles but that may prove time intensive. Let me finish fixing the others first, then time will tell. --JTTyler 18:24, 23 September 2005 (UTC)

Sorry, I didn't see that comment until just now. (I got logged out when editing, which of course removed this page from my watchlist - what a pain!) I appreciate the change - I prefer pipeline markup too, but the conversion is rather tedious. kwami 09:23, 2 October 2005 (UTC)
I cheated --JTTyler 01:23, 6 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] movement color

Hi Akamemoto,

I appreciate you color coding the movement diagrams here and in the shogi article. It looks good, and makes the diagrams much more legible. However, I see you've now gone from a system of giving each type of movement its own color to using different colors for each piece. May I ask why? As it is now, there is no continuity across the game, and several of the diagrams have colors that are rather difficult to distinguish, meaning that they're little better legibility-wise than when they had no color at all. kwami 23:41, 24 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Kirin to Qilin or maybe Kylin

Subject says it all. I was wondering if the users here thought it would be a good idea to change it to the "English version" of the name. I'm really not sure why I used the Romaji when I began the article. What do you think? I think Qilin might be the best option, as it seems to be the "proper spelling". I personally don't care on the matter, but was wondering if others did or if we should just leave it as Kirin. --Sivak 22:10, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

There is no common English version: Qilin is Chinese and Kirin is Japanese. It's normally seen as Kirin in English. Kylin is a fully anglicized word, but hasn't been used much since the nineteenth century. kwami 01:57, 9 April 2006 (UTC)
So I guess I was right to guess Kirin then? How interesting... --Sivak 02:21, 9 April 2006 (UTC)