A 3×4 children's shogi, played out to the last move.
Dōbutsu Shōgi (動物将棋, “animal shogi”) is a 3×4 version of shogi made for children: four piece types, captured pieces return to play as drops, and you win by taking the Lion or marching your own Lion to the far rank. It is strongly solved: with perfect play the second player wins in 78 plies. This explorer is backed by a complete endgame tablebase — all 213,993,386 reachable positions, each labelled win, loss, or draw with its exact distance to mate.
The verdict bar shows who wins and in how many plies; the move list ranks every legal move by result, best first, with its distance to mate. The dots on each piece show how it steps. Drag a piece or click a move to play it; ◀ ▶ step through the line you've played.
The tablebase is computed from scratch (a Rust rules engine and retrograde solver) and verified move-for-move against the clausecker/dobutsu engine, then served from a 333 MB compact table. Code & write-up on GitHub.
Animal glyphs: Twemoji (CC-BY 4.0). Game first solved by Tetsuro Tanaka (2009).