Abstraction: East Asian Chess – Shogi and Xiangqi

Shogi
Apart from the great aesthetics, damn that’s some good print...

Read more...

Thank-you for a wonderful overview of these two games that I've been really curious about.

These look really interesting, and the web crawler obediently filled my ad space with "Yellow Mountain Shogi" sets from amazon at a variety of price levels.

I love physical abstracts like this. That wonderful THUMP of a Go stone on a good hollow board, meaty marble chess pieces, the clink of tiles of a mahjong set. These games look to have similar tactile qualities.

The psychological factor being culturally specific is a fascinating concept as well. Media certainly has latched on to it, how many strategic masterminds are shown playing chess, or the bluffing contest of wills masquerading as a game of poker or blackjack. There was a sci-fi book series way back called Chung Kuo or something that used a lot of Go metaphors for depicting the oblique Sun Tzu type maneuvering of the characters.

Now i want to go home and bust out my Hive tiles for some more ameritrashy abstract goodness

The physicality is a big part of what makes a good abstract. My Xiangqi set, and many others, has big chess men that you grip in your paw and move around. I've a very cheap set of shogi chess men, but if i had regular opponents I'd get a good set. I've submitted articles on Mahjong and Go to follow this, both of which have nice clacky components.

This is useful info even though I don't play abstracts, just from a game cultural familiarity angle.