Comments/Ratings for a Single Item

The Abstract pieces look terrible, which I'm saying as the creator of the original design. Why not just use the Symbolic pieces, which look much better, and have already been made for Shogi from the Abstract pieces? Also, we have much better-looking Kanji and half-Kanji pieces available. Just take a look at the sets already being used for Shogi in Game Courier.

The Abstract pieces look terrible, which I'm saying as the creator of the original design. Why not just use the Symbolic pieces, which look much better, and have already been made for Shogi from the Abstract pieces? Also, we have much better-looking Kanji and half-Kanji pieces available. Just take a look at the sets already being used for Shogi in Game Courier.

I've copied the appropriate images from Eric Silverman's 1kanji set from Ai Ai to use in my diagram in place of the old images (the Mnemonic setup diagrams are still present, to aid in mapping pieces to their correspinding moves). The rest of the page should be good to go, as it is done in a similar format to my other Shogi variant pages.

I've copied the appropriate images from Eric Silverman's 1kanji set from Ai Ai to use in my diagram in place of the old images (the Mnemonic setup diagrams are still present, to aid in mapping pieces to their correspinding moves).

I assume the 1kanji set is a kanji set, and all I see right now is the mnemonic set.

The changes are there, but you will need to refresh the cache of either your browser or the site to see them. All the image links have the ?nocache=true suffix, so they will change immediately once this is done.

I refreshed the page and saw the kanji pieces, which do look a lot better than the old ones. However, I do not see any buttons for switching the piece set, and kanji pieces on a checkered board looks incongruous.

I removed all the old pieces. That said, I can make Mnemonic pieces pretty easily. It's just a matter of forming the templates, and then making pieces from those templates.

Also, the checkered board is an intentional design choice, in case you were wondering.

Edit: I've uploaded enlarged Mnemonic images for Seireigi and the ability to switch between the Mnemonic and Kanji sets (refresh browser cache).

I am not a strong Shogi player, but let me relay a comment from the famous Shogi vlogger Hidetchi, which seems relevant here. Hidetchi once commented on a proposal to let the Gold General promote to non-royal King (I think it was in the now dissolved 81squareuniverse forum). His remark was that that this was pointless, as it should have no significant effect on the game. Shogi is a 'race to mate', where every tempo counts, and dropping a general in the zone, moving it to promote, and then use it to capture something with it (benefitting from the newly acquired moves), takes unaffordably long. The overwhelming majority of dropped generals would never move again for the remainder of the game, and certainly not backward. Typical use is to drop them in front of the enemy King with check, either as a sacrifice to draw it out, or forcing it back, and then drop a new piece with check on a (now protected)  square in front of the dropped general.

To have an impact you would have to add extra forward moves, which could check a King after it evaded the checkdrop. E.g. fR, which sounds very powerful, but since it can happen only in the zone and the other moves of a Gold cannot easily pull it back, in practice only will have very limited forward range, of which the first step was already be reachable by a plain Gold. So it gives you one or two extra (but blockable) moves. If you don't want the promoted piece to be upward compatible, FfR could be a good choice.

On my display the static image of the setup wraps (together with the text) around the Interactive Diagram, and as a consequence is displayed south-east-east of the latter. This looks a bit ugly. I would recommend putting the static image in a separate <div> section, so that it will always be displayed on the left margin. I am not sure why you would want to show two images that initially look identical anyway. When I convert a page to using an Interactive Diagram I usually put the static image between <noscript> tags, so that it would only appear when JavaScript is switched off, and the Interactive Diagram would not. And the mnemonic pieces are shown in the Pieces section of the article anyway.

You set up the page such that clients with JavaScript switched off can never see the appendix, as for those the button would not work. It would be better to load the page with a normally visible appendix, but embed a small JavaScript program to hide that. And the reverse for the Interactive Diagram, to prevent the definition would show up for those with JavaScript switched off. The Diagram script contains a convenience routine to toggle the display style of a HTML element with given id, which you can call for this (and also for the button): <script>OpenDiv('appendix');</script> would do it.

I'm currently experimenting with adding linear Lion moves to the Violent Wolf and Drunk Elephant. Surely, those will have an impact. They would have the same limitations as their current iterations, but would be able to tear through defenses easier, while still being short range.

Edit: For now, in my experiments on piece moves, I have given the Violent Wolf and Drunk Elephant the ability to step twice in a straight line, or jump two squares, along the forward orthogonal and forward diagonals, respectively.

It would give the variant much less 'Shogi feel' when you introduce such an exotic move. I am also not sure whether in Shogi Soaring-Eagle-like Lion capture would do really much more than a two-square jump (or even slide). The locust capture is mainly dangerous because it can eliminate protected pieces. But in Shogi the main factor that determines the value of a piece is how effective it is in checking a King. And there you don't care whether it was protected or not. Starting to hunt for other material by dropping, promoting, capturing takes too long, and you would probably be checkmated before you get the opportunity to drop the piece you gained by it.

Although I think that in Shogi the promotion Silver to Gold was mainly motivated by uniformity, it is not an entirely useless promotion. When dropping a Silver in front of the King to check the latter, the King can evade by stepping next to the Silver. The latter can then pull backwards to renew the check, and by promoting to Gold in the process it can make sure the King now has to retreat.

It would give the variant much less 'Shogi feel' when you introduce such an exotic move. I am also not sure whether in Shogi Soaring-Eagle-like Lion capture would do really much more than a two-square jump (or even slide). The locust capture is mainly dangerous because it can eliminate protected pieces. But in Shogi the main factor that determines the value of a piece is how effective it is in checking a King. And there you don't care whether it was protected or not. Starting to hunt for other material by dropping, promoting, capturing takes too long, and you would probably be checkmated before you get the opportunity to drop the piece you gained by it.

Good points.

Although I think that in Shogi the promotion Silver to Gold was mainly motivated by uniformity, it is not an entirely useless promotion. When dropping a Silver in front of the King to check the latter, the King can evade by stepping next to the Silver. The latter can then pull backwards to renew the check, and by promoting to Gold in the process it can make sure the King now has to retreat.

The same could be said for the Drunk Elephant (or non-royal King). While it may take too long to actually move it, it can still do things that the other pieces might struggle with, such as checkmating a King from the side. That being said, I don't think the double step options will work. For now, I am just going to make the style changes you recommended.

Edit: I've made the changes, and I've decided to give the Violent Wolf and Drunk Elephant sliding moves in the directions I tried giving them double step options on.

Seireigi is ready.

Does it still make sense to keep the names Drunk Elephant and Violent Wolf now that you changed the moves of these pieces? Since you only use 1-kanji pieces you could change the adjective without further consequence. E.g. Ferocious Elephant and Running Wolf.

I suppose I could change the names. But then I would also have to change them in the Ludii file as well. While Ludii does have an enormous collection of LSV pieces (it implements Taikyoku Shogi, crazy enough), there aren't that many elephant or wolf pieces in said collection.

I could use Great Elephant for the promoted Gold. That would make a lot more sense, and since sometimes it is disputed whether it appears or not in the historical LSVs, this version could stand out. But for the wolf piece, I want each promoted form to use unique characters so it stands out, and the running character is already used for the promoted Lance. I suppose I can use the Venomous Wolf here for the same reason.

Edit: I changed the names of the promoted Silver and promoted Gold to Venomous Wolf and Great Elephant, respectively.

Seireigi is ready.

Edit: Slight change of rules. I have changed the Lance so that it steps diagonally forward in addition to its regular moves. As such, its normal drop restrictions apply. This move seems to fit the piece better, as its Japanese name literally means "incence chariot" and chariots don't really have a way to move backwards besides turning around. This change also has another benefit regarding a future four player variant of Seireigi. Everything has been updated accordingly.

Edit: Disregard my previous edit. I was able to find a more elegant solution to the problem I faced with four-player Seireigi without resorting to manipulating piece moves in this game (and also avoiding very costly headaches in the process :) ). Update coming soon.

I've been thinking about the way the game has changed since H. G. Muller's comments. Now that all promotions are unique, it makes less sense to boost the Knight and Lance. Thanks to the changes I made to the promoted Silver and Gold Generals, Seireigi's new identity now revolves around the new promotions, so it doesn't make sense to include new moves that would heighten the learning curve for an already difficult game. Plus, I've come to realize that limitation breeds creativity, and since the drop rule is already in force, I can afford to pop off the extra steps for the Knight and Lance, as their standard Shogi selves already work.

I will need to update this page's description (which requires temporarily deleting this submission and resubmitting it) and update everything else, but it's not like I'm agonizingly experimenting with moves for a single power piece like I did with Suzumu Shogi. This is a good problem to have.

Update coming soon.

Edit: I have updated this page and its PBM counterpart.

Seireigi is ready.

Edit: I also added a vertical step move to the Running Stag to make it better at checking the King. This way each promoted piece has at least three forward moves.

Edit: I've finalized the ruleset, meaning Seireigi's rules are now set in stone, though some of the promotion names may change. Or I could include them in a bigger version of Seireigi...

Edit: I've decided to rename each promotion to its normal Shogi form until I can decide on a good set of names for them, and the board is now uncheckered.

Edit: I'm currently working on pieces for Dai Seireigi, an 11x11 game with drops that "marries" the historical LSVs with modern Shogi. I think I will keep the Seireigi promotions as they were before they changed to Promoted X, but I am still working on the Dai Seireigi promotions.

Edit: I am no longer working on Dai Seireigi, but I have finalized the promotion names for Seireigi.

Seireigi is ready.

Edit: I've updated the static images and the Mnemonic images for the orthogonal sliders (refresh browser cache).

Edit: I've reverted the impasse rule to that of standard Shogi.

I changed the Seireigi Pawn promotion to its normal Shogi form (the Tokin) across all games in the Seireigi family to decrease the learning curve. Also, in all games in the Seireigi family, the Promoted Silver General is now a Running Wolf, but is otherwise unchanged.

Seireigi is now ready for publishing.

I have changed the Heavenly Horse's move to so that it is a bit stronger, as I thought it was too similar to the Tokin's move.

I have also changed the Running Wolf so that it slides vertically, rather than just straight forward.

Chu Seireigi and Dai Seireigi are temporarily offline, as I am working on a new version of these two games.

And now I'm really liking that Heavenly Horse... ;)

And now I'm really liking that Heavenly Horse... ;)

It's definitely better, and it's unique 2-step leaps also pay homage to the Knight's uniqueness among standard Shogi pieces.

The only problem is, this now throws off the carefully constructed balance of piece moves in Chu Seireigi and Dai Seireigi, as all three are in the same family. I have a rule for myself that if a piece appears in multiple games within the same family, it's move must be consistent across all games within that family. The main problem is that the original promoted Copper General (Great Leopard) could only leap, and was very similar to the current Heavenly Horse (it had a sideways 2-step leap instead of a backward Knight leap). I do have a version where it slides sideways or steps one square directly backward or diagonally forward, but I am worried that this is too similar to the Free Tiger.

Well, it's distinctive enough for me, but then again I'm of a mind that even a slight difference makes something new.

If it really worries you, then perhaps you can take away one or more of the HH's forward steps.

To be fair, sometimes I think so deeply about things that I end up overthinking them. I think I will keep the new version of the Great Leopard (promoted Copper) for the larger variants, despite its similarities to the Free Tiger. Both are distinct enough that players shouldn't have too much difficulty telling them apart, especially since the new versions have a Great Leopard appearing in the inital setup (promoting to Flying Ox).

I have added Bob Greenwade's Seireigi piece images to the options for available graphics for the Interactive Diagrams.

Edit: I am also doing this for the other games in the Seireigi family.