Piececlopedia: Gold General

Historical notes

The Gold General, or Kinsho (金將) is a piece from Shogi, Japanese Chess. It also appears in many variants of Shogi.

Movement

The Gold General can move one space in any orthogonal or forward direction. The forward directions are those that move away from the side of the board the player's pieces started on. In Shogi, the piece's orientation indicates which side it belongs to, and the pointed end of the piece points in the straight forward direction. When the spaces are rectangular, as they are for Shogi, the orthgonal directions are the vertical and horizontal directions, and the Gold General has no more than six possible moves. When the spaces are hexagons, such as in Hex Shogi, it may have more than six possible moves.

In the diagram below, Black's Gold General can move to any square marked with a black circle, and White's Gold General can move to any square marked with a white circle.

Checkmating

This piece can generally force checkmate against a bare king, with the help of its friendly king, on boards up to 10x10. Try it!

The following images are used in different piece sets used on this site for Game Courier or Interactive Diagrams.

Graphics

These feature both Kanji characters. The top one, 金, means gold, and the bottom one, 將, means general:

These feature just the Kanji character for gold, in what is known as abbreviated Kanji:

These feature a circle with a dot in the center, which is an astrological symbol for the sun and an alchemical symbol for gold:

These feature a movement diagram. The first one also includes the circle with the dot in the middle, and the second one designates the piece with a capital G for gold:

Credits

Originally written by Hans Bodlaender.

Checkmating section added by H.G.Muller.

Textual revisions made and graphics added by Fergus Duniho, who is personally responsible for the Motif, Symbolic, Japanese Shogi, Japanese Shogi Wood, Diagrammatic, and AI graphics. The Koma pieces were made by Koma-Shokunin 1, and they are used here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license. The Alfaerie image is by David Howe.