1 Introduction

GNU shogi is a program that plays shogi, the Japanese version of chess, against a human (or computer) opponent. This file describes how to use GNU shogi and also gives background information about the game of shogi.

This file describes GNU Shogi version 1.4.1, but most of it was written for version 1.3.2 by Mike Vanier mvanier@cs.caltech.edu, maintainer of GNU shogi at that time.

GNU Shogi is currently maintained by Yann Dirson ydirson@free.fr.

GNU Shogi is actually one program, ’gnushogi’, the text-based program which also contains the game-playing engine. By default it will play Standard Shogi, but can be built to play Mini Shogi (with GNU Shogi 1.4.x, you will need to do that explicitely using ‘./configure –enable-minishogi’, but 1.5 will make this more straightforward).

Most players will just run GNU Shogi through one of the compatible graphical interfaces:

1. Tagua, a KDE-based GUI for Chess and Shogi. Developement stopped several years ago, and it is still somewhat maintained at Debian. Probably the most sophisticated and best-looking free GUI available today.
2. Omaha, a generic board-game GUI, supporting Shogi and other games, with currently only a Gtk2-based UI. Still under developement, but already usable for casual games.
3. Kaya, a small KDE-based GUI successor to Tagua, but development of this still young program seem to have stalled.
4. XBoard/Winboard, a GUI for much more than Shogi, part of the GNU Project. Patches for GNU Shogi to support it are being integrated into the developement version, 1.4.x and earlier versions cannot talk to it.
5. XShogi, an X-Window graphical interface to gnushogi, forked off GNU XBoard years ago, and far from today’s UI standards. It has barely been maintained recently, while XBoard has grown much and is able to play Shogi, and will be soon retired.

   The GNU Shogi distribution used to contain the ’xshogi’ program, In future versions, GNU Shogi will be able to use XBoard as a GUI and XShogi will be retired. XShogi is still available as a separate source archive on the GNU project FTP server.

Disclaimer: I use the personal pronouns “him”, “his” etc. to refer to a shogi player regardless of gender. That’s easier than writing “his or her” all over the place. I don’t mean to infer that women don’t play shogi; in fact shogi is very popular in Japan among women as well as men.