Read straight down and you will take the shortest route to actually playing. Every diagram is drawn from the first player's side, at the bottom.
The dots are where the piece may go. Two things trip everyone up at the start: how gold and silver differ, and that the knight is the only piece that jumps.
When they promote, pawn, lance, knight and silver all move exactly like a gold — there is no new pattern to learn. A bishop becomes a horse (diagonals plus one square in any direction) and a rook a dragon (ranks and files plus one square diagonally).
This is the ground every exchange is judged on. Taking the pawn as 1:
| Pawn | 1 | Lance | 4 | Knight | 5 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Silver | 7 | Gold | 8 | Bishop | 10 |
| Rook | 12 | Tokin | ≈8 | King | — |
In shogi you play the pieces you capture. So losing a piece is the same as handing one over, and every exchange counts twice. Handing over gold and silver in particular is how endgames are lost.
A promoted pawn (tokin) moves as a gold but reverts to a pawn when taken, so it is worth more than a gold in practice — "a tokin is a gold, and stronger than one".
Learn Mino first. It is quick to build, strong against attacks from the side, and it is what almost every ranging-rook opening uses.
The diagrams show the finished shape, not the order the moves are played in. That order depends on the opening.
Bo-gin, the climbing silver, is the one to start with. You march the silver straight up to break through in front of the rook. It has exactly one idea, so when it works you know why, and when it fails you know why too.
If you would rather sit and wait, play the fourth-file rook: swing the rook across to the fourth file, build Mino, and let your opponent come to you. There is very little to memorise.
These are attacks you recognise rather than calculate. Once seen, they are seen forever.
Drop a silver between two golds and one of them is yours.
Drop a pawn one square short of the enemy camp and promote it next move. It looks slow, and it is the most effective attack there is in an endgame — a tokin costs you nothing, because it comes back as a pawn.
A pawn dropped directly under a gold props it up: the rook can hammer at the gold and nothing gives. "A pawn under a gold is harder than rock."
The endgame is a race. If you can mate one move sooner than your opponent, being a rook down does not matter. Start with the basic mate: a gold on the head of the king.
The king has only 2a and 2b, and the gold covers both. It cannot take the gold either, because the silver on 2c is defending it. Close the escape squares first, then put a gold on its head — that is the shape almost every mate reduces to.
The fastest way to improve is to stop after chapters 1 and 4 — how the pieces move, and one castle — and start playing. Come back to the rest when you stop understanding why you lost.