(Original post by karakoro-san: https://note.com/karakorororo/n/n149601dd0157)
I'm one of the few Japanese people currently hanging around on lishogi.
Peeking at the lishogi Discord, it's fun to discover new things every day.
In order to organise my thoughts, I'll write individual posts about the experiences I've amassed.
Maybe it's the disposition of chess players, but I can sense their enthusiasm for shogi variants.
It seems that Crazyhouse (chess, but where you can drop captured pieces like in shogi) and other variants are quite popular; on the internationally-oriented 81Dojo one can enjoy many different variants. On the other hand, Japanese shogi players don't seem to have the same taste for variants. Handicap games at most, perhaps.
There are some admins who are very enthusiastic for the introduction of chu shogi, and more power to them. However, even though I have not played much variant shogi myself, I have heard of this one that stands above the rest, which is Annan shogi.
(Link to note.com post "the king of shogi variants, 'Annan shogi'" by shogi vtuber Sakuya)
I've played it many times for fun after tournaments, and it's pretty fun. Since pieces move according to the type piece one square directly behind them, the more the players are used to shogi the more their brains will struggle. There is no standardised detailed ruleset and this will make implementation tricky, but it would be a great boon if lishogi could make it work as this isn't available even on 81Dojo.
Donations, bug reporting, and feature proposals.
I want to consolidate some concrete instructions for these. For now, definitely take a look at the GitHub page.
It can't be helped since there are few people, but there are few tournaments available for participation during the active hours for Japanese people.
It's not that these belong to the Japanese people, and there aren't in fact that many Japanese people, but as more people arrive there will naturally be more tournaments, so I will wait.
Because berserking is an option there can be sudden turnarounds, so it is interesting.
The high-impact 15-second-no-increment time control is available, and if some well-known shogi YouTubers were to make videos it would definitely create some buzz.
Even if we don't do anything, there will be an explosion of interest.
The most effective advertising is probably Shogi Sekai (TN: 将棋世界、 a monthly shogi magazine published by the JSA).
Currently, the Japanese people who have used lishogi at least once are just a very limited group of lichess users and shogi Vtubers. Probably most people don't even know lishogi exists. It's still in beta, so maybe wide-ranging advertising isn't needed yet.
I'd like to see some life on Twitter.
(Link to the lishogi twitter account with no tweets at the time of writing)
By the efforts of ch_suginami-san, it's mostly complete. Hats off to them.
I don't know if it's from chess or lichess, but there seems to be a culture of eyes growing on a piece, and it's creeping into lishogi. It's the bigsby emoji. A total mystery.
~translated by Illion
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