Wa shogi

Wa shogi is a large board variant of Japanese chess played on an eleven by eleven grid, giving each side twenty seven pieces rather than the twenty used in standard shogi. Every piece in the set is named for an animal rather than for a military or court role, which is the trait that most clearly separates it from ordinary shogi and from other large shogi variants. The game can be played either with or without the drop rule that lets a captured piece return to the board under its capturer's control, a flexibility that is unusual among the large shogi family and that reflects how unsettled the historical record for this variant is. Because early descriptions of wa shogi are sparse, modern players and researchers have had to reconstruct a workable, broadly agreed set of piece movements rather than inherit one intact from an unbroken written tradition. The pieces' animal names and the larger board give the game a distinctive character among the many large-board shogi variants that were devised in Japan over the centuries, most of which never achieved the lasting popularity of the standard nine by nine game.