Regular readers of the Mindzine will know that we have excellent coverage of Shogi and Xiangqi. But these are not the only interesting chess games to be found in the Far East ...

Here you can find out about more of the fascinating varieties of chess which come from this part of the world.

I am very grateful to Colin Adams, Phil Holland, George Hodges and Seong-June Kim for the information they provided on some of these games.

Makruk is the Thai form of chess. It is played by millions of people, not only in Thailand but also in Cambodia, and many books in Thai about Makruk are available.

The game is believed to be at least a thousand years old, and of all the forms of chess still played today it may be closest to the original common ancestor game. The picture shows a Makruk set with a paper board. This type of set is readily available in Thailand.

Although Makruk appears similar to chess and can be played with a western chess set, the lack of long-range diagonal-moving pieces completely changes the character of the game.

According to Sam Sloan, the game has a really massive following in Thailand, with national championship games played in sports stadia and moves reported on the TV news. Living chess displays with traditional music, dancing and duelling are also popular. The most famous player of Makruk is Suchart Chaivichit, who was the national Makruk champion for over a decade. Although he played Makruk first, he also excelled at chess and won a gold medal for his performance in the 1988 Chess Olympiad in Greece.

Sam Sloan's Makrook Page includes the rules and the scores of two top-level games from the 1990 Thai national championships. He also has contact details from some of the organisers of the game in Thailand.

At this Thai Hypermarket site you can buy a Makruk set online. Tim Krabbe's page on Makruk in Cambodia includes a good freeware Makruk program that you can download. And this page from the site of the Sriwittayapaknam school in Thailand has the Rules of Makruk explained by the school Makruk champion!

There are also many pages in Thai about the game, for example this one. And another Makruk program is available from here.

The Korean form of chess is usually known in English as Changgi or Jang-Gi. It has many similarities to Xiangqi. However, there are significant differences which make the two games feel very different to play. One is that the Changgi pawns can move sideways even before promotion - this means that they can support each other in a horizontal chain. Another difference is that the Changgi cannon cannot jump or take an enemy cannon. This makes the cannon less effective as an attacking piece.

One interesting feature of Changgi is that it is legal to pass your turn instead of making a move. So there is no zugzwang or stalemate! Another unique feature is the move of the elephant, which goes one space orthogonal plus two diagonal - like a large-scale version of a knight's move.

The Korean Changgi Association was founded in 1956. Players are ranked on a dan system similar to that used for Go. In Korea, Go (known locally as Baduk) is the more popular game, but the numbers who play Changgi are also said to run into millions. There are many Korean Web sites which deal with the game, for example http://members.xoom.com/janggi/ and http://user.chollian.net/~zsjang1/. The picture shows a magnetic Changgi set from Korea. It is also common to find sets with pieces which are octagonal rather than round. Note that different characters are used for the corresponding pieces on opposite sides.

Here is Roleigh Martin's Korean Chess page. Among other things, this includes the rules and a downloadable freeware program for playing the game. There is also information about Changgi on Hans Bodlaender's Chess Variant Pages.

Chu Shogi has been played since at least the 14th century, and in those days was more popular than any other form of Shogi. It is a relative of modern Shogi, but is played on a 12x12 board, with 46 pieces on each side. And it is played without drops. The game has now more or less died out in Japan, although the great Shogi master Oyama Yasuharu (15th Lifetime Meijin of Shogi) made an attempt to revive it in the latter half of the 20th century. He had often played Chu Shogi in his youth and he said it had had a strong effect on his Shogi style.

The rules of the game and moves of all the pieces can be found on Roger Hare's Chu Shogi page. The same site has information about standard Shogi and about other Shogi variants.

There are discussions on Chu Shogi, and on other Shogi variants, at this Shogivar Discussion Group page. And a good way to try out playing Chu Shogi and other variants is to play Steve Evans' excellent freeware program, available from this Shogi Variants home page.

One very interesting feature of Chu Shogi is the piece called the lion. This can take two pieces in one move, or it can take one piece and then return to the square it came from! Another unusual feature is that a piece called the drunk elephant can promote to a crown prince which is essentially a second king.

Historical documents on the game contain more than 200 mating problems, and these have attracted a great deal of interest. The earliest date back to 1675, and the majority of the problems were published without solutions. Some have remained unsolved right up to the present day.

The most famous problem, known as problem C49, is amazingly complex. The longest lines of the solution are 22 moves long. And there are 12 different 22-move mates, depending on the moves played by the defending side. Moreover, there are many plausible-looking lines which only just fail.

The hardest group of problems, 100 problems known as the D group problems, resisted all attempts at solution until fairly recently. In 1999, solutions to most of these problems were at last published. A concerted effort by George Hodges and the late David Murphy, both UK shogi players, had led to about two thirds of the problems being solved. This is quite remarkable as the problems appear to have been unsolved for over 300 years! Of course, the challenge of solving the remaining problems endures ...

Steve Evans and Colin Adams and their Chu Shogi programs have also worked on these problems. Colin's program can in theory solve any Chu Shogi mating program, but in practice it is not fast enough to solve some of the historical problems. Colin estimates that to solve the famous puzzle C49 would take the program six and three-quarter million years! However, the program has corrected many of the previously published solutions to some of the less complex problems.

Here is Colin's Chu Shogi page, which has a downloadable version of his program as well as a commented version of the decisive game from the last European Chu Shogi Championships when Colin was the winner. The picture shows the starting position in Chu Shogi. This is a screenshot from Colin Adams' program, reproduced with his kind permission. A new place to play Chu Shogi by e-mail has recently opened. This is the International Chu Shogi Ladder.

And Colin Adams is starting to develop a Chu Shogi Library to cover all aspects of the game.

There are several other historical varieties of Shogi, and also modern variant forms. Good places to find more information about these are Roger Hare's Pages, Steve Evans' Page and the Shogivar Discussion Group - all mentioned above in the section on Chu Shogi. Roger's pages and Steve's program describe the rules of many variants.

A particularly popular Shogi variant is Tori Shogi. This is a small-board historical shogi variant where all the pieces are named after birds. Tori Shogi is said to have been invented at the end of the 18th century by Ohashi Soei, the 9th Lifetime Meijin of Shogi. Scores of top-level games dating back to 1830 have survived to the present day. The picture shows a modern Tori Shogi set. Tori Shogi is also played in the international Postal Shogi League. And the Royston Shogi Club sometimes organises a national Tori Shogi championship in the UK. This was last held in 1997, when the champion was Stephen Lamb.

David Courtney's Tori Shogi site will tell you how to play the game and give hints on strategy and tactics. One opening, analogous to the "poisoned pawn", is dubbed the septic swallow!

The larger Shogi variants feature many exotic pieces. These have many unlikely sounding names - such as free tapir, fragrant elephant, vermillion sparrow and enchanted badger. Pieces in these large-board games often have particularly powerful moves. For example there is the hook mover, which is like a rook that can go round corners! It can move any number of spaces in one orthogonal direction, followed by any number of spaces in a direction at right angles to that.

The biggest Shogi variant is Tai Shogi, which dates back to at least the 17th century. It is played on a board 25 by 25, and each side has 177 pieces - a typical game could take about 1000 moves by each player to finish. To add to the complications, each side has an emperor and a crown prince and you have to capture both of these pieces in order to win! As if this was not bad enough, the emperor has a move that allows it to travel anywhere on the board, so long as it does not capture a protected enemy piece!

The most unusual historical Shogi variant is perhaps Tenjiku Shogi. A particularly fearsome piece in Tenjiku Shogi is the fire demon. The fire demon burns any enemy piece on any of the eight adjacent squares, so it can effectively take several pieces at once. And it can move to any square reachable by three consecutive king moves.

The game also features range-jumping pieces which can jump over any number of intervening pieces to reach their destination. The best place to find out more about Tenjiku Shogi is this excellent downloadable 180-page book The Struggle for Survival by Colin Adams. The book has rules, openings, example games etc. - everything you could want to know about the game.

Georg Dunkel's site has pages on Micro Shogi and Nana Shogi. These two modern games are the smallest Shogi variants - Nana Shogi is played on a 3x3 board! On the Micro Shogi page, Georg is playing a series of games by e-mail against all-comers who send in moves for black. So far he is unbeaten.

There are some fun games among the modern Shogi variants played by Steve Evans' freeware program. In Yari Shogi, invented by Christian Freeling, none of the pieces other than the king can move backwards. And in Whale Shogi by Wayne Schmittberger all the pieces are named after species of whales or their close relatives. In this game there is an innocuous piece called the porpoise which transforms into a deadly killer whale when it is captured.

A good contact for more information about Shogi variants, and particularly Chu Shogi, is George Hodges. He has information and equipment for historical Shogi variants, and has produced the excellent Middle Shogi Manual, the definitive book on Chu Shogi. He can also be reached at: PO Box 77, Bromley, Kent BR1 4ZG; Telephone: +44 (0)20-8466-6564)

Here are the rules for Sittuyin, on Hans Bodlaender's chess variant pages. Sittuyin is the Burmese form of chess, and is said to be still played in the north west of the country.

One notable feature of Sittuyin is the variable starting position - players have considerable choice on the opening configuration of their pieces. The definitive book on the game is the Burmese Chess Guide written by Shwei-gyin U Bha in the 1920s. The picture shows some Sittuyin pieces from Burma. These are from the collection of James Masters, reproduced with his kind permission from his excellent Online Guide to Traditional Games.

Shatar is the Mongolian variant of chess. Here are the Shatar Rules by AISE, the Italian variant chess association who have organised e-mail tournaments of the game. Shatar has four different sorts of check, which each have a different status when trying to reach checkmate!

Sittuyin and Shatar are among the many games you can play at this excellent Chess Variant Applets page.

And it is worth remembering that the Far East does not have a monopoly on interesting traditional varieties of chess. For example, here is the home page of Senterej, the traditional form of chess in Ethiopia. Some other African and European countries also have their own traditional chess games, but that is another story ...

• The Encyclopaedia of Chess Variants, David Pritchard, Games & Puzzles 1994
• Chinese Chess for Beginners, Sam Sloan, Ishi Press 1989
• Middle Shogi Manual, George Hodges, The Shogi Association 1992