Maka dai dai shogi

Maka dai dai shogi is one of the largest and most elaborate variants of shogi ever devised, played on a board of 19 by 19 squares, the same grid size used in Go. It descended from and expanded upon two earlier oversized shogi variants, dai dai shogi and dai shogi, during the medieval period in Japan, and each side commands 96 pieces spread across 50 distinct piece types, requiring players to learn 74 different movement patterns. Unlike ordinary shogi, captured pieces cannot be dropped back onto the board and reused by the capturing player; promotion instead happens only when a piece captures an enemy piece, a mechanic called promotion by capture. The historical record is incomplete: surviving descriptions come from three Edo period manuscripts that disagree with one another on several piece movements, leaving modern researchers uncertain how widely the game was actually played versus assembled as a display set. Later designers have built on the material anyway, producing a streamlined variant called hishigata shogi meant to speed up play, and a modern revival called maka dai shogi that reconciles the old sources into a single playable rule set.