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H. G. Muller wrote on Mon, May 4, 2020 08:09 AM UTC:

Yeah, the shear size of Tai Shogi so far deterred me from making a page for it. You could look at Maka Dai Dai Shogi, though: this uses the same Emperor (except that you can only get it through promotion). This says:

The Emperor is a Universal Leaper: it can move to any square of the board. It cannot capture enemy pieces that are protected, though. That even holds for capturing the opponent's last royal. Protected here means that the Emperor could have been recaptured if the opponent would have been allowed to play on without royal.

In FIDE a King cannot capture a protected piece, but it can capture a protected King, so it is illegal to put it next to your opponent's King even when protected. For Emperors the opposite holds: you cannot capture a protected Emperor with it. (This difference is due to the after-move, and in the description of the Emperor I elaborate on the initial statement in terms of such an after-move.) Note that the historic rule descriptions of these games are very minimal. So it is not really known if the ban to expose your Emperor to capture is for every move, for every capture or just for capturing the opponent's last royal. Because no one in his right mind would ever even consider exposing his Emperor to capture if it would not be for the purpose of instantly winning the game or taking out the opponent Emperor, they don't waste words on it. Were the game to continue, being an Emperor behind means a certain loss. Also, Shogi is usually played under the rule "illegal move = loss", as opposed to FIDE, where "illegal move = take back". So it is completely pointless to make extra rules that make losing moves illegal in Shogi.

Anyway, this ignores the main point: the purpose of the glossary is to clarify matters by assigning unique meanings to concepts that universally apply. Not to promote confusion by making the definition of a term context dependent, possibly in an undesired way. If a term is ambiguous because its meaning depends on context, its use should be discouraged. If we describe such terms, it would be wise to accompany those with a warning like:

The meaning of this term is context-dependent, and to minimize confusion due to incorrect interpretation of the context, it should not be used in rule descriptions.


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