TABLE HEPTATHLON
Shogi
The Rules
A member of the chaturanga family, Shogi is thought to have entered Japan between the 11th and 13th centuries BCE, only to be evolved into a completely different game in the following decades, until it reached its actual form as early as the 15th century, according to historians.
Shogi has remained to this day both popular and highly respected in Japan, while rather obscure for the rest of world, probably because of the striking differences that it shows when compared to other chaturanga-derived games.
The board is a 9x9 rectangle, with uncheckered "squares" (rectangular in shape).
The armies are made up of 20 pentagons each, in variable sizes, not identified by different colours, because of the game-changing rule that allows one player to drop (as part of his army) the pieces he has previously captured from his opponent when it's his turn to play. While these pieces are not yet dropped, they're said to be retained 'in hand'.
Promotion, optional on most occasions, happens when entering, exiting or going through the opponent 'field', represented by the farthest three ranks on the board, and each piece gets promoted to a definite unit, simply by flipping the piece to display the new unit's Kanji.
The only difference that can be found between Sente's (first, player, Black in English) army and Gote's (second player, White in English), is the Kanji on the General pentagon: 玉 for Sente, 王 for Gote.
Since explaining the complete set of rules and some worth-noting exceptions would be rather verbose, we provide instead some links above for instruction purposes.
Initial set-up
Winning the game
As it's often the case, checkmate wins the game for one player and loses it for the other.
In Shogi, there are no draws by mutual agreement, although there are exceptional positions that cannot be won.
