How to Start Shogi: A 30-Day Roadmap for Complete Beginners

Here’s the mistake almost everyone makes when they decide to learn shogi: they get the order wrong. They buy a $70 board before they know the rules. They buy three opening books before they’ve played a single full game. They read a 40-page PDF on strategy before they’ve ever delivered a checkmate. None of that is stupid, exactly — it’s just backward, and backward is expensive in a way that has nothing to do with money. It’s expensive in motivation, because a beginner who’s three books deep and still can’t finish a game quits.

I’m a 2-dan shogi player based in Japan, and I get some version of “where do I even start” more than any other question about this game. So here’s the actual order: 30 days, broken into weeks, with a specific thing to do in each one. Nothing on this list costs anything until week two, and the one book worth buying costs about the same as two coffees.

Quick Picks: what to actually buy, and when

You don’t need any of this on day one. Bookmark this table and come back to it when the roadmap below tells you to.

Day 0–3: Learn the rules, and don’t pay for it

You do not need a book, a course, or a coach to learn how shogi’s pieces move. The rules are genuinely free, and the resource I’d send you to first is my own complete guide to learning shogi from scratch, which walks through the board, all eight piece types, promotion, and the rule that actually makes shogi shogi: captured pieces switch sides and come back into play as your own. That one mechanic is the entire reason shogi feels different from every other chess variant on earth, and it’s also the thing that trips up strong chess players the hardest.

If you already play chess, don’t start with the beginner guide — start with Shogi for Chess Players instead. It maps what you already know onto the shogi board and flags exactly where your chess instincts are about to get you into trouble. Chess players who skip this step tend to relearn the drop rule the hard way, one lost game at a time.

Three days is enough. You’re not trying to master anything here — you’re trying to reach the point where you can look at a board mid-game and know what every piece on it is allowed to do. That’s a much lower bar than it sounds, and most people clear it in an evening or two, not three full days.

Week 1: learn to checkmate before you learn to open

This is the step almost every beginner skips, and it’s the one I’d protect most fiercely if I were redesigning how people learn this game. Shogi is a game that exists entirely to produce checkmate. Every opening, every piece formation, every tempo spent — all of it is in service of eventually delivering mate or avoiding one. So learn it backward. Learn what mate actually looks like before you spend a single hour memorizing how to develop pieces.

The tool for this is a free app called Shogi Wars, and specifically its Mate Battle mode: a head-to-head speed-solving race where you and an opponent work through ten checkmate puzzles pulled from real games, three minutes on the clock. It needs zero prerequisite knowledge beyond how pieces move, which you already have from Day 0–3, and it’s the fastest way I know to build a library of mating shapes in your head. Those shapes show up in literally every other mode you’ll ever play.

Two things first: get the app switched into English — it’s the app most of Japan actually plays on, but it ships in Japanese by default and the menu is not self-explanatory. Then read my breakdown of all five Shogi Wars game modes so you’re not guessing what Sprint or the three Normal time controls are for later. Spend this whole week almost exclusively in Mate Battle. Yes, only Mate Battle. Resist the urge to jump into a full 10-minute game yet — you’ll get there next week, and you’ll be dramatically better prepared for it.

Week 2–3: play full games, and buy your first book

Now you play real, complete games. Ten-minute games on Shogi Wars are your main event — it’s the only time control on the app with room to actually think, and it’s where a game unfolds the way it’s meant to: opening, middlegame, endgame, all in one sitting. Play as many as you can stand.

This is also the point where I’d tell you to spend money for the first time, and specifically on one book: Japanese Chess: The Game of Shogi by Trevor Leggett. It’s the closest thing English has to a canonical shogi text — rules, basic strategy, and annotated games, all in one volume, and the 4.6-star average across 271 reviews isn’t inflated the way a lot of niche-hobby book ratings are. There’s an older, equally respected alternative in John Fairbairn’s Shogi for Beginners, but be honest with yourself about patience before you order it: at the time of writing it was listed as taking around two weeks to ship, so it’s the wrong pick if you want something to read this weekend.

Alongside full games, start a daily tsume-shogi habit — these are shogi’s dedicated checkmate puzzles, the same skill Mate Battle was building last week, just untimed and on paper (or screen) instead of head-to-head. My beginner’s guide to tsume shogi explains the format and how it differs from a chess mate-in-N. For material, Tsume Puzzles for Japanese Chess by T. Gene Davis is close to the only dedicated English-language tsume book on Amazon — 200-plus problems running from 1-move to 13-move mates. If Mate Battle gave you the taste for this, this book is where you go deeper.

Week 4: openings, but lightly

Only now, in week four, do openings enter the picture. Not before, and I mean that as a genuine constraint, not a suggestion — beginners who study openings before they can finish a game are memorizing moves they don’t understand the purpose of, and that knowledge evaporates the first time an opponent deviates from the line they memorized.

My guide to shogi openings for beginners covers the two big opening families and three beginner-friendly systems to actually try. Treat it as a set of plans and ideas, not a script to memorize move-for-move. The single most common way people waste money in this hobby is buying opening book after opening book before they’ve internalized what an opening is even trying to accomplish. One book, read lightly, is plenty for week four. You’ll know when you’re ready for more, because you’ll start losing to specific patterns you can’t explain — that’s the signal, not a calendar date.

When to buy a real board

You don’t need one yet, and you may never need one — plenty of strong players, myself included, do most of their actual games online. But if the itch shows up, and for most people who make it this far it eventually does, don’t start with a $70 wooden set. Start with a cheap magnetic travel board. The Yellow Mountain Imports 9.6-inch magnetic set is under $20, it’s one of the most-reviewed shogi products on Amazon at over 1,000 reviews and a 4.5-star average, and it exists specifically to answer the question “do I actually want to own a board” without committing real money to the answer.

If the game has you for good and you want to go beyond a travel set, I’ve written a full shogi set buying guide covering wooden boards, piece quality, and what’s actually worth paying for versus what’s connoisseurship. Read it when you get there. Not now.

What NOT to buy yet

This section is the one I actually care most about, because it’s the one that costs you nothing to follow and saves you the most money and frustration.

Skip hand-carved pieces. Tendo-carved koma, the kind you’ll see described in reverent detail on collector forums, are a real and beautiful thing, and they are completely wasted on a beginner. You cannot yet tell the difference in hand between a $20 set and a $250 hand-carved one, and no one has ever lost a game because their pieces were printed instead of engraved. Buy these when you know shogi has you for years, not when you’re deciding whether it has you at all.

Skip the out-of-print classics. The Art of Shogi by Tony Hosking is a legitimately excellent book, and it’s also been out of print for years, which means used copies have been quietly climbing past $75. That’s not a price a beginner should pay for a book they don’t yet know how to use. The Leggett book above covers the fundamentals for a fraction of the cost, and it’s still in print for a reason.

Skip stacking multiple opening books. One opening resource, read lightly in week four, is enough. Buying three because you’re not sure which system suits you is a symptom, not a solution — the person who improves fastest is the one playing games, not the one cross-referencing opening theory across four different authors. I’d go further: the people who improve slowest in this hobby are almost always over-invested in materials and under-invested in play. Don’t be that person. It’s an easy trap and an expensive one.

FAQ

Is shogi hard to learn? The rules themselves are not hard — there are only eight piece types, and most people can learn how they all move in an evening. What takes longer is developing judgment about when to attack, when to defend, and how to use the drop rule well. That’s exactly what this 30-day roadmap is built to accelerate: rules first, checkmate patterns second, full games third, opening theory last.

What’s the best book for beginners? Japanese Chess: The Game of Shogi by Trevor Leggett, without much competition. It’s the most complete English-language introduction available, well-reviewed, and cheap. John Fairbairn’s Shogi for Beginners is a respected alternative if you don’t mind a slower ship time from Japan.

Do I need to read Japanese to play shogi? No. Shogi pieces use kanji, but there are only eight piece types, and the characters stop registering as “foreign” within a handful of games — the same way you don’t consciously decode a chess knight’s horse head after a while. You’re learning eight symbols, not the Japanese language.

How long does it take to get decent at shogi? Decent is doing a lot of work in that question, but if you follow this roadmap — rules in days, checkmate patterns for a week, then real games — most people can hold a coherent full game and stop hanging pieces for free within a month or two of regular play. Real strength takes years, same as any serious game. But you don’t need years to start enjoying it, which is really the point of everything above.

---

Disclosure: links to products on this page are affiliate links. They don’t change what you pay, and they help keep this site running.