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 covering all 246,803,167 positions reachable from the start (folded by symmetry to 213,993,386 stored entries), 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.
L Lion · G Giraffe · E Elephant ·
C Chick · R Hen (a promoted Chick). Moves read from→to:
Gc4-c3 moves a piece, Cb3xb2 captures, C*b1 drops one
from hand, and a trailing + marks a Chick promoting to a Hen (Cb3-b4+).
The tablebase is computed from scratch (a Rust rules engine and retrograde solver) and verified move-for-move against clausecker/dobutsu, an independent open-source solution of the game, then served from a 333 MB compact table. Full write-up: Solving Dōbutsu Shōgi; code on GitHub.
Piece and board artwork © Maiko Fujita, from Dōbutsu Shōgi by Madoka Kitao (Nekomado), used here with permission and not licensed for reuse. This is an unofficial project, not affiliated with or endorsed by Nekomado. Game first solved by Tetsuro Tanaka (2009); independent open-source tablebase by Robert Clausecker.