A Game Courier Preset for Xorix Shogi

Xorix Shogi

Appears to enforce rules, but no display of legal moves.

Welcome to Game Courier, where you can play Xorix Shogi and many other Chess variants through online correspondence.

Rules of Xorix Shogi

Xorix Shogi, created by A. Black, is played as Shogi except as follows:

1. When one piece captures another, the captured piece is put in hand unchanged, and as long as the capturing piece is not a King, it transforms into a piece with all the powers that were had by either piece (either the capturing or the captured piece) but not both, as well as the ability to move one space vertically forward, which all pieces always have.
2. When a piece promotes, it gains the power to move one space in any horizontal or vertical direction. When promotion happens, it occurs after any transformation brought on by capturing a piece. Any piece that cannot already move one space in any orthogonal direction is able to promote by moving into, out of, or within its player's last three ranks. All other pieces are unable to promote.
3. A piece with no powers of movement except moving one space vertically forward counts as a Pawn for the purpose of drops, but other pieces do not. (Such a piece bears the number zero on it.)

Notation

This preset automates piece captures, transformations, drops, and promotions. You never have to tell it what to change or promote a piece to. It figures this out on its own. You never have to manually place a captured piece in hand. It handles this on its own. You never have to enter the coordinate a dropped piece moves from. When you drop a piece, just use the * operator by entering the piece name, the operator, and the destination. When promotion is optional, you should indicate that you want to promote the piece by entering the "promote" keyword as a single command after your move. You should place a semicolon between the move and the "promote" keyword. The preset will know what the piece should promote to, and it will alert you if a promotion is impossible or illegal. Enter most moves with the hyphen operator. Just enter your origin coordinate, a hyphen, and your destination coordinate. You may also prefix this with the piece notation and a space. You are encouraged to do this to make the movelist easier to read.

Technical Notes

Except for the King, the pieces have been given names based on hexadecimal numerals. Each piece includes a diagram showing how it moves. Details on what the numerals and diagrams mean are given on the Xorix Shogi Pieces page. When one piece captures another, the new piece is determined by XORing the numbers on both pieces together. When a piece promotes, the new piece is determined by ORing the old piece's number with 2. Piece names also begin with a b or w prefix to indicate which side each piece belongs to.

To reduce the time required for loading this page, this preset does not show all available pieces below. This should not affect their availability in the game.

How to Move Pieces

Full Algebraic Notation

Algebraic notation identifies each space by a coordinate that begins with its file label and ends with its rank label. On the Chess board, files go up and down from one player to the other, and ranks go from left to right. In most games, files are represented by letters, and ranks are represented by numbers, but there is no fixed rule requiring this for all games, and some games, such as Shogi, reverse this convention. If you look at the diagram, you will usually see the file labels going from left to right and the file labels going up and down. And if you hover your mouse over a space, you will normally see the name of the coordinate appear in a tooltip.

It is not uncommon to see algebraic notation being used for Chess, but it is often in an abbreviated format that requires you to know both the rules of the game and the current position to know exactly which piece moves where. For example, the notation "Ne6" indicates that a Knight is moving to e6, but it doesn't indicate which Knight, and it doesn't specify where the Knight is coming from. To figure this out, you need to know how a Knight moves and which Knight on the board can make a legal move to e6.

Although rules may be programmed for individual games, Game Courier itself does not know the rules of any game, and it is unable to parse abbreviated algebraic notation. Therefore, it relies on full algebraic notation, which completely specifies the move without requiring any knowledge of the game's rules or the current position. The most usual type of full algebraic notation indicates the piece that is moving by its label, the space it is moving from, and the space it moving to. In Chess, a typical first move might be written as "P e2-e4". When you hover your mouse over a piece, you will normally see the piece label followed by the coordinate for the space, and when you hover it over an empty space, you will normally see the coordinate label. Including the piece label in your notation allows Game Courier to check that the piece you're moving is the right one, and it makes game notation easier to follow, but it is not mandatory.

You may promote a piece by including a promotion move after your regular move. A promotion move has a piece go directly to a coordinate. Here is an example: "p e7-e8; q-e8".

You may remove a piece from a space by adding an @ to the space or by omitting the destination coordinate. For example, both "@-e4" and "e4-" would remove the piece on "e4". This is useful for en passant when you are playing a game that does not handle this automatically. For example, "P d5-e6; e5-" removes the Pawn on e5 after a Pawn moves from d5 to e6.

You will not need to remove spaces for most games, but if you should need to, you can do this by omitting the first coordinate in a move. For example, "-e4" would remove e4 from the board. To add or return a space to the board, you may add an @ or any other piece to it.

Available Pieces

Pieces are represented by labels, usually using uppercase letters for White and lowercase letter for Black. When you enter a move or specify the starting position for a game, you should remember that piece labels are case-sensitive. Many piece sets are available for use with Game Courier, and this table shows you which pieces belong to the piece set you are currently using.

These pieces come from a set containing more pieces, but this preset has had the set of pieces reduced to those used in the game.

Credits

This preset uses the Xorix Shogi settings file for Xorix Shogi, which was made by Mister Praesident.

Game Courier was created, programmed and written by Fergus Duniho.

Game Courier, Copyright © Fergus Duniho, 2001-2017