Shogi notation

A record of an abstract strategy board game such as shogi is called kifu (棋譜) in Japanese.

(Note the x indication is a significant departure from Japanese notation, which has no way of signaling whether a piece was captured.)

Following western chess conventions, omitted moves are indicated with an ... ellipsis.

In handicap games, White plays first, so Black's first move is replaced by an ellipsis.

Unlike western chess, game states like check or checkmate are not typically notated.

The earliest way to indicate game records in Japan during the Edo period was to use descriptive sentences such as Open the bishop's diagonal, push the rook's pawn, close the bishop's diagonal and the like.

The player's side information is optional and the movement and promotion indications are only used in order to resolve ambiguity.

In such cases, knowing which player the move refers to can be determined by the context in the book.

Earlier (for instance, in the Edo period), only Japanese numerals were used for both file and rank coordinate.

There is also an abbreviatory convention: when a piece moves to the same coordinates as the previous move's piece (as in a capture), the position is simply indicated with 同 (which is pronounced dō or onajiku) instead of the file-rank coordinate numbers.

In some cases where the coordinates may be forgotten by the reader (for instance, if its antecedent is separated by a page turn or several paragraphs of text), then the number coordinates will precede 同 to aid the reader like this: ☖２四同歩.

However, this older practice is not used in the modern period, where horizontally writing is read from left to right following European language traditions.

The 引 and 上 indicate downward and upward movement, respectively, that can be both vertical as well as diagonal.

Unofficially, in some literature there exist two alternate symbols that are used instead of 上: 行 and 入.

However, these alternate symbols are reserved for indicating only the two most powerful promoted dragon 龍 and horse 馬 pieces.

In certain situations, an indication of movement toward the destination square (that is, with 引, 寄, 上) is not sufficient to resolve ambiguity.

In these cases, the origin square of the piece is notated with a relative positional indicator.

Additionally, the 直 indicator tends to always be used for vertical movement even when simply using 右 ("right") and 左 ("left") would suffice.

Unlike western notation, numbering Japanese game records is not obligatory.

But, other captures of pieces that do not have the same coordinates as the preceding move are simply not indicated in the notation system.

For example, the 23 square was indicated by the symbol を. Tokugawa Ieharu (the tenth shōgun 1760–1786) favored this notational system.

The order of elements is the same as the western system except that a player's side argument is added.

Like the Japanese system, rank (row) coordinates are indicated with a numeral (and not a letter).

[e] It also shows an example of ambiguity resolution (G69-58/５八金左) and a piece entering a promotion zone that remains unpromoted (Sx23=/２三銀不成).

SFEN is an extension of Forsyth–Edwards Notation (FEN) used for describing board positions of shogi games.

In the example, rank 1 is lnsgk2nl which indicates sequence of lance, knight, silver, gold, king followed by two empty squares to the right of the king and a sequence of knight and lance.

Below is another example showing the board position for Yoshiharu Habu's famous 52 silver drop in an NHK game (Bishop Exchange Climbing Silver opening) with Hifumi Katoh.

Internally, it uses Japanese notation in the UTF-8 text encoding, and each move is disambiguated with an origin square.

GNU Shogi also uses EPD instead of SFEN: the same board description, but with holdings appended in square brackets.

The following field for player to move has colors reversed from SFEN: w for sente, and b for gote.