How a game actually plays out

The objective

Checkmate the opponent's king — put it under attack with no legal way to escape, block, or capture the attacker. That's the entire goal. Sente always moves first, and players alternate one move at a time for the rest of the game.

Capturing

Move one of your pieces onto a square occupied by an opponent's piece and you capture it — remove it from the board and set it in front of you, still yours, but now held "in hand" (mochigoma) rather than on the board. This is the rule that separates shogi from almost every other chess variant: material never truly leaves the game, it just changes sides.

Dropping pieces from hand

On your turn, instead of moving a piece already on the board, you may take a piece from your hand and place it on any empty square. A dropped piece counts as your move for that turn, enters the board unpromoted regardless of where you drop it, and is immediately a full member of your army — it can be captured right back like any other piece.

Drops come with three restrictions, all designed to stop a drop from creating an unfair, unbeatable position:

• Nifu (二歩): you cannot drop a pawn onto a file that already has one of your own unpromoted pawns on it. One unpromoted pawn per file, always.
• No stuck pieces: you cannot drop a pawn or lance onto the far rank, or a knight onto either of the far two ranks — the same restriction that makes promotion mandatory for those pieces applies to drops too, since the dropped piece would have no legal move ever again.
• Uchifuzume (打ち歩詰め): you cannot drop a pawn if doing so delivers an immediate checkmate. (Checkmating with a pawn is fine if the pawn was already on the board and simply moved forward — it's only the drop that's forbidden.)

Check and checkmate

A king in check (王手, ōte) must have that check dealt with on the very next move — by moving the king to safety, capturing the checking piece, or blocking the line of attack. If none of those are possible, it's checkmate (詰み, tsumi) and the game is over.

You may never make a move that leaves your own king in check, including moving a piece that was blocking an attack. And unlike chess, there's effectively no stalemate: because you can almost always drop a piece somewhere, players who are out of good options simply keep playing until someone is checkmated or resigns.

How games end

Most shogi games end one of four ways:

• Checkmate — the most decisive ending, and the only one that's a forced rule outcome rather than a choice.
• Resignation — by far the most common ending in practice. A player who sees the loss coming says "makemashita" ("I have lost") rather than playing out an inevitable checkmate. Resigning at the right moment is considered good etiquette, not giving up early.
• Sennichite (千日手) — if the exact same position, with the exact same pieces in hand, occurs four times with the same player to move each time, the game is a draw. The one exception: if one side has been giving check every single one of those repeated moves, that side loses instead of drawing — perpetual check is not a legal escape route.
• Jishogi (持将棋), an impasse — on rare occasions both kings fight their way into the opponent's camp and neither can realistically be checkmated. If both players agree the position is a hopeless impasse, remaining pieces are scored by point value and the game is decided (or drawn) by that count, under a rule called the 27-point rule.

That covers the full rule set. Next, some ideas for what to actually do with all of this: continue to Beginner Strategy.