Shogi Castle: Japanese Chess

Shogi is Japanese chess: capture a piece and it joins YOUR army. Shogi Castle teaches it from the first move and gives you somewhere to use it every day, on a phone or a tablet.

LEARN FROM ZERO
Ten short lessons take you from an empty board to your first castle. Every lesson is hands on: you move the pieces, and the app checks your move against the real rules. No jargon, no walls of text.

DAILY TSUME
Tsume are checkmate puzzles, the way shogi players have trained for centuries. One shared puzzle a day, a practice ladder from mate in one to mate in eleven that remembers what you missed and brings it back at the right time, and Sprint: ninety seconds of short mates against the clock. The library holds 1,727 problems, each one machine-checked so that exactly one line wins. Puzzles taken from real games are a separate set: there, any mate counts.

BEST MOVE
Thousands of positions from real games with one clearly best move, and often no mate at all. Sacrifice, drop, promotion, quiet move: practice one idea at a time.

MINO, A BOT THAT PLAYS LIKE A PERSON
Twelve levels of practice opponent. The first eight learned from real players' games and move the way people of that strength move, mistakes included; the top four calculate on our server and need a connection. Mino runs on your device, so levels 1 to 8 play offline with no waiting. The levels wear a number and not a kyu grade, because we have measured that each rung beats the one below it and have not measured where any of them sits on a human scale. Play with a clock or without one, resign politely, play again.

REVIEW EVERY GAME
After a game the review marks the moments where the game turned, worked out on your device with no connection needed. Ask our server for the whole game and it grades every move, gives your accuracy and names the losing move, or for a deep analysis of any one position.

PLAY OTHER PEOPLE
Ranked shogi online in two time controls, blitz and standard, each with a rating of its own. If nobody is free, a bot sits down after about twenty seconds, so an empty queue is never a wasted evening. Play a friend with a room code, unrated. Five ranked games set your rank; until then you are in placement, because fewer than five is not enough to tell you what you are.

MADE TO BE READ
Every piece can wear a movement guide on its face, so you never wonder how the knight jumps. Move notation in Western letters or Japanese figures. Share any game as KIF. A piece reference and a castle guide are one tap away. Landscape layouts for tablets. In English, Japanese and Turkish.

THE CASTLES
Mino, Yagura, Anaguma. Walking your king into a castle is the first real skill in shogi, and the app is named after it.

Progress lives on your device. No account needed to start.