Shogi Resources

Overview

This post collects a variety of resources for learning and playing shogi. It is by no means exhaustive, but it includes the main resources I have personally found useful.

Learning

• Knowledge Share: A brief knowledge share I made on shogi. It leaves out some details, since it was meant to be a visual aide, but it still has some nice, quick info. It’s a google slides presentation, so you will want to swipe through each slide.
• Lishogi Learn: Excellent website for teaching, puzzles, and playing shogi against a computer. Doesn’t have a huge player base, but the interface is wonderful. If you do the the entire learn section, you’ll be more than ready for some fun games. There is also a resources section which has many additional great links.
• Lily’s Static Rook Basics: Great guide on the static rook playstyle put together by Lily, the first person I ever played.
• Killer Ducky’s Study Plan:
• Hidetchi: Makes excellent tutorials on YouTube. This guy is the OG.
• Shogi Terminology: Amazing collection of hundreds shogi terms.
• Takodori Joseki: Huge collection of digitized joseki. It might be a fun project to convert all of these into a lishogi study.

Supplies

I have a dedicated post where I discuss my three personal shogi sets. However, this section provides a larger list of places to buy shogi gear.

• Shogi CZ: My number one recommendation for beginner friendly boards and pieces.
• Tengudo: The online storefront of a shogi and go store in Kyoto, they have a wide and often affordable selectinon of go and shogi gear, including miniature boards, affordable carved sets, and more.
• Kurokigoishiten: Sells a large assortment of premium shogi and go gear.
• Neko Mado: Shogi books, blank pieces, variants like kyoto shogi, and several high quality beginner’s sets.

Playing

• Lishogi: Excellent website for teaching, puzzles, and playing shogi against a computer. Doesn’t have a huge player base, but the interface is wonderful. If you do the the entire learn section, you’ll be more than ready for some fun games.
• 81 Dojo: Incredibly antiquated, but this is where all the players are.

Books

I’ll give detailed thoughts on these books either in a future post or in my goodreads. For now, this is a list of the physical shogi books I own.

• Better Moves for Better Shogi: by Aono Teruichi, 322 pages. In this bilingual book, one of the top ranked professional players of shogi provides the basic strategies for all aspects of shogi play. This book is written in Japanese with a translation provided in English
• The Art of Shogi: by Tony Hosking
• Habu’s Words: by Yoshiharu Habu
• Classic Shogi: by Tony Hosking, 192 pages. This collection includes mainly games by such masters as Ohashi Sokei III, Ito Sokan II, Ito Kanju, Amano Soho, Kimura, Tsukada, Masuda, Oyama, Naito, Kato, Yonenaga, Nakahara, Tanigawa, Sato, Habu and Moriichi.

Fonts

Here are the main characters you would need to type shogi:

• 王玉
• 飛車龍竜
• 角行龍馬
• 金將
• 銀將全
• 桂馬今圭
• 香車成杏仝
• 歩兵と

Here are some nice font websites, if you want to print or carve the letters:

• Morisawa
• Kanji Sensei