Shogi Castle: Japanese Chess

Shogi is Japanese chess: capture a piece and it joins YOUR army. Shogi Castle teaches it from the first move and gives you somewhere to use it every day, on a phone or a tablet.

LEARN FROM ZERO Ten short lessons take you from an empty board to your first castle. Every lesson is hands on: you move the pieces, and the app checks your move against the real rules. No jargon, no walls of text.

CASTLES, OPENINGS AND TESUJI Walking your king into a castle is the first real skill in shogi, and the app is named after it. Fifty-seven castles, each built move by move. Ninety-one openings, most of them played out for both sides. Twenty-four tesuji, the standard tactical tricks, and ten named mates.

TSUME AT YOUR LEVEL Tsume are checkmate puzzles, the way shogi players have trained for centuries. The library holds 1,561 problems, from mate in one to mate in eleven, each one machine-checked so that exactly one line wins. They come in four levels, from beginner to dan, and each level is a numbered set: you can see what you solved, what you finished with help and what is still ahead. Continue brings back what is due for review, then gives you new problems.

A PUZZLE EVERY DAY One shared tsume a day, with a streak to keep. And Sprint: ninety seconds of short mates that get harder as you go.

PUZZLES FROM REAL GAMES 2,695 mates that happened in rated online games, picked near your rating within the level you choose. Here any mate counts. Find the move has thousands more real positions with one clearly best move, and often no mate at all. Sacrifice, drop, promotion, quiet move: practice one idea at a time. Both have the same four levels as tsume, and the app remembers the one you pick.

MINO, A BOT THAT PLAYS LIKE A PERSON Twelve levels of practice opponent. The first eight learned from real players' games and move the way people of that strength move, mistakes included; the top four calculate on our server and need a connection. Mino runs on your device, so levels 1 to 8 play offline with no waiting. The levels wear a number and not a kyu grade, because we have measured that each rung beats the one below it and have not measured where any of them sits on a human scale. Play with a clock or without one, resign politely, play again.

REVIEW EVERY GAME After a game the review marks the moments where the game turned, worked out on your device with no connection needed. Ask our server for the whole game and it grades every move, gives your accuracy and names the losing move, or for a deep analysis of any one position.

PLAY OTHER PEOPLE Ranked shogi online in two time controls, blitz and standard, each with a rating of its own. If nobody is free, a bot sits down after about twenty seconds, so an empty queue is never a wasted evening. Play a friend with a room code, unrated, even or with a handicap. Five ranked games set your rank; until then you are in placement, because fewer than five is not enough to tell you what you are.

MADE TO BE READ Every piece can wear a movement guide on its face, so you never wonder how the knight jumps. Move notation in Western letters or Japanese figures. Share any game as KIF. Landscape layouts for tablets. In English, Japanese and Turkish.

Progress lives on your device. No account needed to start.

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