Well I guess I might as well start things off then here and be the first post =P
Today I had the opportunity of having a friend on my floor teach me how to play Shogi (also known as Japanese Chess). I've played Xiangqi (Chinese Chess) with my grandfather before, and play Chess on a semi-regular basis, so I figured it wouldn't be that hard to pick up.
Despite having my ass handed to me for three games in a row, I noticed that I picked up how to move the pieces much faster than I did Xiangqi - most likely due to the way the pieces are designed.
Above: Xiangqi, Below: Shogi
In both games, the main way to differentiate between pieces is the character written on the piece. Although this makes pieces easier to produce in comparison to western chess, it can make the learning curve a little harder, especially if you're illiterate in Chinese like I am (although Shogi is a Japanese game, from what I've seen, pieces are usually written in Kanji, which is essentially traditional Chinese). Shogi however was a little easier to pick up as the pieces are also differnt sizes - the king is the biggest piece, and the weakest, the soldiers, are the smallest (easier to tell in the enlarged image) - if you couldn't remember what the charter was, the size of the piece could help out in telling you whether or not it was worthwhile to try to save it or not.
So it appears that the design of the pieces influence not only the price of manufacturing the game (disks vs. plastic molds) but also how easy it is to learn the game - coming from a chess background it took me a bit longer to be able to figure out what was going on as all the pieces looked the same. Not only that, but portability/storage is also affected, as the game with the simpler pieces were easier to pack up (I have never seen a western chess game fit inside the same size box as Xiangqi, let alone Shogi).
All in all, all three games were easy enough to learn - now if only strategy was that easy to come up with.
First post!
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