Taikyoku shogi

Taikyoku shogi is the largest known variant of shogi, the Japanese chess family of games, played on an enormous board of 36 by 36 squares with 402 pieces per side, for a total of 804 pieces in play. It was devised in Japan, likely during the sixteenth century, as an extreme extension of earlier large shogi variants such as dai dai shogi and maka dai dai shogi, compiling many of their piece types into a single, vastly expanded game. Because of its size, a single game of taikyoku shogi as originally conceived could take many days to complete, and the sheer number of distinct piece types, several hundred by name, made it more a compendium and intellectual exercise for the Japanese nobility and scholarly class than a game played to conclusion in ordinary circumstances. Taikyoku shogi is generally regarded by historians of the shogi family as the outer limit of a broader medieval Japanese trend toward ever larger board games, standing at the far end of a spectrum that runs from modern shogi's manageable nine by nine board up through progressively larger courtly variants.