Shogi Board Part 2

First of all, I made a slight edit to the materials needed. I realized that I needed 3 - 1/2" x 2" x 3' Pine boards, not 2. The reason being that since the boards are ultimately going to fold in half, I need the 1/2” board on all four sides and not three, as this photo depicts.

The missing side is right where the hinges need to go. If I don’t add the fourth side then the hinges would attach to the top of the board itself and wouldn’t close properly.

The next part of the project was to make the print outs that I’m going to iron to the pieces. I decided that I want people to easily pick up and play this game. For that reason I chose to not use the traditional Japanese characters for the individual pieces. Instead, I have a single letter (or a picture of a crown for the king) to indicate what the piece is and what moves are legal for the piece to make directly under it.

The lines with no arrows indicate that it can only move one space in that direction, while the lines with arrows mean it can move any number of spaces in that direction. I did manage to find a website that gave the proper angles to make a shogi piece (but I can’t find it again) such that I could make the above pieces. Once the shape was made, I optimized the size for something I thought would fit nicely in a 1.5”x1.5” square. You know, something large enough to grab on to, but not so large that it’s impossible to grip it without messing up the pieces in adjacent squares. From that base size, it was just some simple math to find the right size ratio for the smaller pieces (as in chess, the different pieces are different sizes).

Additionally, I think I’m going to label the board itself with the starting location of the pieces (haven’t decided yet).

Again, the idea isn’t so much for authenticity, as much as it is for ease of a first time player. Ideally, I’ll be playing this game with people who have never seen or perhaps even heard of shogi before. The game will be much more fun if you can set it up easily and not have to worry about remembering how each piece can move and which word in a non-Latin alphabet foreign language means what.

Here are the two excel files I made. The file for the shogi pieces includes a second sheet for their promoted side. We’ll how well I do in affixing the promoted side after I affix the non-promoted side. The Shogi Board file has some garbage at the bottom of the page. I’m using that garbage to iron it own to some scrap wood to get the technique down before using it on the real deal. It’s there for you to do the same. If you do use these, remember that you need to print them as mirror images to affix it to the wood.

Here’s the file I used for the shogi pieces

Here’s the file I used for the shogi board

These are both saved in a Excel 2007 format. You might need this patch from Microsoft to open 2007 documents in older versions of Office (assuming you don’t already have it, of course)

The next step is ironing the pieces on. We’ll see when I can do it.

Shogi Board Part 2