Play Shogi (Japanese Chess) online with Game Courier

Game Courier let's you play Shogi by online correspondence with a variety of graphic options, including both western pieces and Japanese pieces. Some of the options are provided below, and further customization is available, including more board images and more piece sets. When you play, you can click or tap a piece to see its legal moves, and you can click or tap a space to preview your move. If you are satisfied with it, you can make your move official. If not, you can go back and try something else. You will be prevented from making illegal moves, and captured pieces will automatically be converted to your side, demoted as need be, and placed in hand for you. Click on one of the buttons below to begin.

These presets are new as of March 2022. They now use the fairychess include file. These differences are under the hood, since these remain notationally identical to the presets from 2010. They now put pieces in hand and drop pieces in a different order. To keep more pieces close together, they alternate between files, and they drop the last piece of the selected type that was captured. There are some bug fixes. For example, these will now avoid displaying as legal a Pawn drop that would checkmate the King. They also have the features I added in 2010. Here is what I wrote then:

These presets are new as of November 2010. They are much like the old ones with somes fixes and the ability to ask you when you want to promote a piece. When you have the option to promote but don't indicate the promotion in the move you enter, which will commonly happen when you're using the mouse to enter moves, it will ask you whether you want to promote, then rewrite your move accordingly. Note that the checkered boards display as HTML tables and will use the least bandwidth. The other boards use background images and may be displayed using CSS code, which will reuse the same images, saving bandwidth as long as the images stay in your cache, or as single freshly-created images in either GIF, JPG, or PNG formats. Generally, GIF or JPG will produce images smallest in filesize, and PNG will produce full-color lossless images.

The Symbolic set, the Chess Motif set, and the Japanese font set (seen on the sodalite blue board) are all made by Fergus Duniho, who also created Game Courier and programmed these presets. The Japanese sets seen on the plain blue and plain beige boards are the work of Koma-Shokunin 1, used here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license