Tsume Puzzles for Japanese Chess: Introduction to Shogi Mating Riddles

Simple and straight to the point. I love this book and the problems are challenging, yet reasonable in difficulty. HIGHLY recommend for anyone who wants to improve their Shogi tsume skills

Excellent book. Explains the rules of Tsume Shogi really well, has pictures in the front of the book to teach what each piece is and how it moves in case you don't already know. You could learn Shogi from the ground up with this book.Each puzzle focuses on a different aspect of Shogi or teaches a different kind of lesson, it's important to try new and different things in each one, moves which may seem counterintuitive, including piece sacrifice to force board position.

Most likely you're looking at this book because you are hurting for books on shogi in English. This isn't a bad book, but it's mainly just mating puzzles, which are easy enough to do even if you don't speak Japanese, and the book is not in English. But, still, this is a solid book of shogi puzzles, and it's nice not to struggle against the language barrier every once in a while.

It's great to finally have a tsumeshogi book in English! The puzzles are very simple; flipping through it, I haven't found one that I couldn't solve at a glance. I think this would be a great book for beginners, which is a good thing since it's the only tsume book available right now in English. My only complaint is that Mr. Davis calls it "Japanese Chess" instead of shogi in the title.

Tsume puzzle is Japanese chess counterpart of checkmate puzzle in Chess, In Japan tsume books are often regarded as art works rather than practice drills. The standard to be recognized as good Tsume-shogi is a lot more complicated than what the tsume books in Japanese say. Tsume problem in Page 81 for instance, Japanese tsume books simply state one solution disregarding the other two which are too simple. As a Japanese I do not know the reason why. But the plausible answers could be one of the move must have "great one" not easily found. First half of the problems are a bit too easy for even kyu level Japanese chess players but as the moves become large-numbered it will be much more difficult.While the move difficulty is not that much, it may not be good for true beginners because the book gives only solutions and notcommenting enough why the particular solution is best. In Japanese tsume book almost one page is set aside for one to two tsume problems with comprehensive diagrams. For the next tsume book I suggest the author seek professional help from real Japanese tsume books writers for the quality of the problems as well as comprehensive comments with diagrams for kyu-level players.Verdict: Good workbooks of Japanese ChessRating: 80 out of 100. It needs a lot more comprehensive comments. Also the problems need technical "proofreading" to improve the quality of tsume problems.Recommended for Japanese chess fans

Good book for practicing the mating problems. Easy to follow and challenging as the reader advances with the problems. Recommended.