Shogi

Shogi, also known as Japanese chess, is an abstract strategy board game for two players, played on an eighty one square board with forty pieces, and one of the most popular board games in Japan; the Sport atlas already carries Shogi as a competitive game entity, and this hobby entity records the same game as a domestic pastime. What its own players call hon-shogi, or standard shogi, to distinguish it from older variants such as chu shogi, is defined above all by its drop rule: a captured piece is kept by the capturing player as a piece in hand, or mochigoma, and can be dropped back onto the board on a later turn under that player's own control, a mechanic speculated to have arisen around the fifteenth century, possibly echoing the practice of switching allegiance among samurai mercenaries once captured. The drop rule alone gives shogi a game tree of roughly ten to the two hundred twenty sixth power, far larger than chess's ten to the one hundred twenty third, and shogi games end in a draw only two to three percent of the time at professional level, compared with more than half of professional chess games. The game descends from the sixth century Indian game chaturanga, transmitted to Japan through China or Korea, reaching roughly its current form by the fifteenth century, though a predecessor without the drop rule is already documented in the 1210 historical text Nichureki.