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You can play with Pawns promoting to Princes instead of Queens, as they lie on the second rank, as the Shogi Bishop and Shogi Rook do. You can even play with a naive promotion of Bishops to Primates, Rooks to Chatelaines, and Pawns and Knights to Queens. Of course, the Draughts variant is not playable. In Draughts, you must move forward, so there is no opportunity to permanently block. Rithe with capture, the board clears up and the pieces that can move backward cannot cower behind a wall. What defense there is is solved by zugzwang. Your variant fails in that one can move a King into an opponent's corner and blockade him with dropped Men and another King, providing only enough space for tempo moves, with the Men blocking any mandatory capture.
'Bi' in Japanese does mean something. It means beauty, written ”ü by kanji (ideograph)or ‚Ñ by kana (sound). The symbol ƒr is also the sound 'bi' in katakana but normally katakana isn't used for native Japanese words. If you want it to mean beauty, you might want to use the kanji, if you do not want it to mean beauty, you should probably use kana (hiragana or katakana, probably katakana).
I have noticed a small error in my Southwark Bishogi array - it should have the same Pawn ranks as Shogi-81. As this is only a minor subvariant I will leave further updating until I need to make a more major one.
There is no double move as Pawns are promotable on the seventh rank and these rules together preserve the 5-step Pawn trek. There is thus no en-passant. Castling is a tougher question. Shogi has no castling, but then it has no long-range piece its own move away from the King. Xiang Qi is little help either, as that too has a rule automatically barring vastling: the General cannot leave the middle three files, which it would do if it castled! I have also failed to specify castling in the related Anglis Qi, and am interested to hear the thoughts of others on castling for both variants. By the way, I have now taken to writing HTML files, so if anyone can send me the Bishogi one I can start work on adding in hte info. I'll keep 8x8 as standard, but may add the 9x9 interpretation to the middle of the last paragraph.
Again I was guilty of too much shorthand. The 9x9 description on the Index pages suggests that two Messrs. Howe have found it confusing! The board is 8x8 with only one Queen aside, but I compare the Queen to the Goldgeneral in that (1) it is on the 4th file in, (2) it is has the greatest long-term unperomoted strength on the back rank, (3) it is a Ferz substitute among 8-file arrays just as the Goldgeneral is among 9-file ones. The Pawns are on the second rank, because as I say, there is 'no middle rank', not even an empty one. The statement that players can use a novelty FIDE Chess set or, if they can manage to ignore the usual meanings, a Shogi set 'minus the four surplus pieces' does make it clear tha only sixteen pieces aside are required. The idea of a 9x9 version of Bishogi is an interesting one, but it would have a problem of Bishops starting on the same colour. Mind you, the fact that promotion and/or reintroduction could overcome that is even more in keeping with Shogi itself... Perhaps the confusion comes from the 'further variants' section. Sekishogi is another 8x8 varint, but Southwark Shogi is 9x9. It may have been sloppy to throw that in with the others, but I felt that it was a bit too frivolous to have a page of its own.
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