Six games are grouped together under the label Chess-Family War Games, and the label invites an assumption: that every member traces back to one ancestor game passed from hand to hand across Asia and Europe. This subcategory's own description states the actual test more narrowly: capture games where the pieces have differentiated ranks and powers, each moving by its own rule, rather than a uniform army where every piece behaves alike. Common descent is not the requirement, and three of the group's own members show why that distinction earns its own page.
That distinction matters most for the group's own outlier, Tafl Games. Tafl is a family of ancient Northern European board games, played on a checkered or grid board, in which the two sides are unequal from the start: one player commands a king and its defenders starting from the center of the board, and the other commands a larger force of attackers trying to capture that king before it can escape to the board's edge. Tafl games were played across Scandinavia, the British Isles and other Norse-influenced regions from at least the early medieval period, until chess itself displaced them in popularity across much of the same ground. Nothing in Tafl's own record ties it to India, Persia or China. It belongs in this subcategory because its two sides carry differentiated roles, exactly the entity's own stated test, not because any document connects it to Chaturanga.
Even the games that plainly do share a documented lineage do not all agree on how far that lineage reaches. Chess descends from Chaturanga, the earliest board strategy game clearly documented in India, whose army of infantry, cavalry, elephantry and chariotry became the modern pawn, knight, bishop and rook after passing west into Persia as shatranj and on into the Islamic world and medieval Europe. Janggi, Korean chess, is undisputed too: it descends from Xiangqi, distinguished mainly by its own piece values and its diagonal palace lines, with the codified game attested in Korea's own Joseon dynasty texts and boards from the fifteenth century onward. But Xiangqi's own origin, the ancestor Janggi's own documented lineage runs directly through, is a live scholarly disagreement rather than a settled fact: H.J.R. Murray argued Xiangqi descended from Chaturanga by diffusion across Asia, while David H. Li argued for an origin inside China's own indigenous game traditions, unconnected to India. The subcategory's name assumes one settled family tree. Its later member Janggi inherits whichever answer to that dispute eventually wins, and no one has settled it yet.
Shogi makes the same point from the opposite direction. It belongs to the wider Chaturanga family by lineage, like chess and xiangqi, but the feature that most defines how an actual shogi game plays, the drop rule, in which a piece captured from an opponent is not removed from play but is held by the capturing player and may later be dropped back onto the board as that player's own piece, has no equivalent anywhere else in the family. A cache of shogi pieces recovered at Kofuku-ji temple, dated to roughly the eleventh century, points to a less standardized proto-shogi already in play in Japan well before textual references to the modern game appear in the sixteenth century. The rule that makes shogi shogi was not something the family passed down. It was added later, inside Japan, on top of an inheritance the rest of the family never received.
Read this way, Chess-Family War Games is less a settled family tree than a design category that a family tree happens to mostly fill. What actually holds it together, on the subcategory's own stated terms, is that every member gives its pieces differentiated roles. Whether the games are related at all, and how closely, turns out to be the one question the grouping itself declines to answer.