Topic: Can anyone play Koi Koi or Shogi?

Here's an interesting question - There's two board/ card games that are incredibly popular in Japan, but have never really moved out to the rest of the world.

Koi Koi is the "default" game you play using Hanafuda cards. What's interesting about this game is it's actually got some old bad stigma attached to it - it used to be well-known as "the" game the Japanese mafia (Yakuza) played. As such, a lot of "respectible" Japanese people have never played the game themselves, or owned a deck of Hanafuda cards.

As a game though, Koi Koi is a lot of fun - something somewhat similar to Mah Jong.

It's also worth noting that Hanafuda cards are closer to Mah Jong tiles than western playing cards. They're actually very small, and made of very hard cardboard - they don't bend.

Shogi is Japanese chess, and it is huge there, but incredibly obscure in the West. It's hard to lean because the pieces are abstract and differentiated using Japanese characters, rather than the miniatures of western chess.

Once you understand the basics of how the pieces work, though, it's if anything a more complex take on the basic game of chess. It's a big game still in Japan, with the best Shogi players as well respected as the best chess players in, say, Russia.

So does anyone else know how to play these games?

I don't know, but I'm learning. I ordered the Hanafuda cards off of Club Nintendo to start. I didn't quite get the instructions at first, but I'm kind of starting to get the hang of it.

I've played a little bit of Koi Koi on Clubhouse Games but I'm still not really sure how to play.

Bought some Hanafuda cards while in Japan. The game is a lot of fun!
I learned how to play Shogi on Clubhouse Games, but I sucked at it, and kinda forgot how to play.

I love me some Koi Koi though, but no one in the family has any interest to learn how to play it, so I just play it with some friends every now and then.

I love me some Koi Koi.

I play Koi Koi.

You can pay Shogi on Playok.com with chess symbols instead of kanji. You can also get an "internationalized" set from elephantchess.com. It's a fairly ugly set but functional (their Xiang Qi set is great though, and has the kanji on the reverse side of the pieces if you feel like being fancy pants). I have long been tempted to marker my silver and gold generals with arrows showing how they move for new players, as everything else is easy to understand from looking.

Shogi is easily my favorite form of chess. The ability to drop captured pieces adds a huge layer of strategy, and being able to promote (usually just to a gold general) any piece but kings and gold generals when placed in the last three ranks is also very interesting. I used to play a lot at PlayOK before I switched to Chrome OS which sadly does not support Java. I still try every now and then on other computers, but you absolutely need to practice the game regularly to be good at it, as your Western chess strategies will not translate.