Teaching Shogi to Kids: What to Teach First

Shogi is played on a 9x9 board of 81 squares, with eight kinds of pieces and 20 pieces per player. Captured pieces can be used again, pieces promote and change how they move, and you win by checkmating the king. That is a lot to take in at once, even for adults, and more so for children.

This post sets out an order for teaching shogi to children in five steps. The rules here follow the Japan Shogi Association’s game rules and its FAQ on rules (both in Japanese). The way the steps are divided is one example.

1. Piece moves, one at a time

Start with how the pieces move. You can add the eight kinds one by one rather than set them all out at once. One order is king and pawn, rook and bishop, lance, gold and silver, then knight. The reasons and some memory tricks are in How Shogi Pieces Move, so here I will keep to the main points.

You don’t need to play a game yet at this stage. Put a single piece on the board and ask the child to point to where it can go. When they can, move on to the next piece. If you start playing before the moves are clear, every move turns into a pause to check, and for a child the tedium comes before the fun.

Leave promotion for later. It causes less confusion once all the moves are known.

2. Capturing games

Once the moves are learned, practise capturing on the board. For example, the child has one rook and the adult lines up a few pawns, and the child wins by taking them all. Change the number and kind of pieces as you like.

The point of this game is to learn by hand that a piece captures by moving onto a square occupied by an opponent’s piece. The idea of not moving your own piece to a square where it can be taken also comes up naturally here. This can be seen as the first step in reading ahead in shogi.

3. From catching the king to checkmate

Next, play games with the king as the target. At first it is fine to use a simple rule: you win if you capture the opponent’s king. Taking something is an easy goal for a child to understand.

In real shogi, though, you don’t play on until the king is taken. A king that can be captured is in check, and the player in check has to deal with it. When there is no way to do so, it is checkmate, and the checkmating player wins. The Japan Shogi Association’s FAQ says that a move which ignores check is a foul and loses immediately.

So once the child is used to capturing the king, start rephrasing the goal: the game ends when the king can no longer escape, before it is taken. Once that clicks, children start to ask themselves whether a position is mate. Tsume shogi, mating puzzles, is a good way to practise mating patterns.

4. Teaching drops

Being able to put a captured piece back on the board as your own is the defining feature of shogi. Neither chess nor go has it. I wrote about the differences in Shogi, Go and Chess: The Differences.

Once drops come in, the number of pieces on the board stops going down and the game gets much more complicated. That is why this order teaches drops near the end, together with promotion. Illegal drops such as nifu, two unpromoted pawns on the same file, can be explained one at a time when they actually happen.

5. Playing full shogi with a handicap

When all the rules are in place, move on to full shogi. But if an adult and a child play with the same pieces, there is no contest. This is where handicap games, komaochi, come in. The stronger player removes some pieces before the game and moves first.

The Japan Shogi Association’s FAQ lists the handicaps used in the dojo at the Shogi Hall in Tokyo. A difference of two ranks means a lance handicap, four ranks a rook handicap, six or seven ranks a two-piece handicap (rook and bishop), and ten or more a six-piece handicap (rook, bishop, both lances and both knights). The Japanese Wikipedia article on shogi handicaps says that in teaching games between a beginner and a strong player, they often start with the six-piece handicap. There is an even larger one, the ten-piece handicap, where the stronger player has only the king and pawns.

The good thing about handicap games is that the adult doesn’t have to hold back for the child to have a real chance. There is also a view that winning a serious game against a handicap feels better. If you agree to remove one fewer piece once the child is ahead, they can see that they are getting stronger.

Keeping it fun

With the steps in place, there are two more things to watch.

One is to keep each session short. A capturing game takes only a few minutes. One guide is to stop when the child says “one more”.

The other is the size of the board. If 9x9 feels too big, you can start with Dobutsu Shogi, played on a 3x4 board. It keeps the core of shogi, including reusing captured pieces, so it works as a bridge to the full game. I introduced it at the end of How Shogi Pieces Move as well.

As for what age to start, another way to judge, rather than by age, is whether the child can point out how a piece moves. They can learn the pieces by shape and position even before they can read the characters on them.

Teaching with Mindsports

StudyX Mindsports is an app with 12 strategy games, including shogi, go and chess. The shogi beginner lessons teach the rules through tap-to-answer quizzes and then let you practise in real game positions. The lessons are available in 15 languages.

Two people can play on one device, and in games between two people you can choose handicaps from a lance handicap up to the six-piece handicap. So step 5 above can be done right on the device. When a child practises alone, they can play the CPU from Lv.1 to Lv.50. It goes up one level when you win and down one when you lose, so the opponent adjusts to your results without you choosing a strength. You can take back moves, and after a game you can step through it move by move with Review.

The games and beginner lessons are free, with ads. Each game’s first advanced lesson is free too, and a one-time purchase opens the rest and removes the ads. How to use Mindsports is in Getting Started with Mindsports. For practising mating patterns, there is also Shogi365, a tsume shogi app.