Tiny Shogi 48

I wanted to play shogi instead of doing the LD so I made an implementation of the minishogi variant of shogi (Japanese chess). :D

You can play against the computer, it's not the greatest AI ever but it does a standard minimax and can be challenging. At the highest level, having lots of captured pieces can slow down the AI a lot.

Some info about minishogi and shogi on wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minishogi
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shogi

I have not used the Japanese characters to make the game more accessible. Instead I've used diagrams that show how the piece moves. I hope they are understandable.

*UPDATE*

MINI-HOW TO PLAY:
So this is basically a variant of chess. The goal is to capture the opponent's king. You have to actually take the king since I didn't implement checkmate.

The pieces are from left to right: King, Gold general, Silver general, Bishop and Rook. On the second row in front of the king there is a Pawn.

Rather than use the Japanese characters like normal shogi, I've made diagrams of how each piece moves. Normal line means one step in that direction, an arrow means as many steps as required.

Like chess you capture by moving on the square occupied by an opponent's piece. You cannot jump over pieces. Unlike chess the pawn has no special capture move.

In shogi, captured pieces can be moved back into play on any empty square. This counts as your turn. The only restriction is that the pawn can't be dropped on the last row (since it couldn't move).

Promotion: Most pieces (all except gold general and king) can be promoted if they move to, from or inside the promotion zone. In minishogi the promotion zone is the row furthest away from you (like in chess).

Pawn and Silver move like Gold when promoted.
Rook and Bishop gain an extra one step move in the directions they don't move normally.

Promoting a piece is optional except for the pawn (since it would have no move left if left unpromoted). But most of the time it's a good idea to do it. Pieces always revert to their unpromoted state when captured.

For experienced shogi players: I didn't implement special rules to forbid two pawns on the same column and or giving checkmate with a dropped pawn, so you can use those should they happen in a game. They don't really matter for minishogi anyway.

That's all ;)

BUG FIX: I've made a little bug fix in the submission hour: the AI would sometimes resign suddenly. That was not intended and could confuse and frustrate players trying to learn the game so it will always play a move if possible.

I used Unity, coded in C#, made the graphics with Modo, ZBrush, FilterForge and Photoshop, sounds with SFXR and music with Autotracker and Reason.

--== Please leave me a comment when you rate, thank you for playing my game ==--