Board Games
The oldest board game in Asia, pachisi, is a race game to move pieces from start to goal on the board. Pachisi in ancient India had ninetysix spaces on a cruciform board. Four people play with four pieces, which are moved from outside to inside. The first player who takes all his pieces from start to goal wins. Pachisi and its transformation, ludo, spread rapidly to Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Europe. In the third century BCE, a combat board game named shaturanga (four persons) was invented in India. Four people battled with eight pieces (four pawns, a chariot, a horse, an elephant, and a king). Shaturanga is the ancestor of Western chess and Eastern shogi (xiang-chi in China).
The most popular board games in East Asia are go (wei ch'i in China; baduk in Korea) and shogi. They are played by millions of people in Asia today, especially in China and Japan. Go was invented in China by the sixth century BCE. In the game, two players alternately put black and white stones on the board to surround an area. A stone must be placed on the intersection of the vertical and horizontal lines. There are nineteen horizontal and nineteen vertical lines on the board that forms a grid of 361 points. Whoever has more territory at the end of the game becomes the winner. The oldest Chinese reference (sixth century BCE) said that go was a most elegant game because it was intellectual. Go was introduced into Japan from China or Korea and was spread among priests and aristocrats in Japan.
Shogi is a kind of chess developed from shaturanga in India, which was brought to Japan in the eleventh century. In shogi, there are nine horizontal and nine vertical lines on the board. Shogi is similar to Western chess in that it is played by two players and its object is to checkmate the opponent's king. Checkmate is achieved when the king cannot escape. A game also comes to an end if a player must resign because the king's position is hopeless. In many ways, however, shogi is different from chess. The major differences are that the captured pieces may be reused by the capturing player and that each piece becomes stronger when it enters the portion of the board marked as the opponent's area by three horizontal lines. Most shogi players feel that this makes shogi more profound and interesting than Western chess.
Further Reading
Kishino Yuzo, Yoshio Kuroda, Yuichi Suzuki, and Takeo Fukugawa, eds. (1987) Encyclopedia of Sports. Tokyo: Taishukan.
Obayashi Taryo, Yuzo Kishino, Tsuneo Sogawa, and Shinji Yamashita, eds. (1998) Encyclopedia of Ethnic Play and Games. Tokyo: Taishukan.
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