Board and fog
The game starts from the standard Shogi setup. Black, or sente, moves first in Shogi, so these examples use Black's board orientation unless a label says otherwise. At the start, you see your own 20 pieces and every square they reach. Everything else is fog. The server still holds the full position, and your opponent receives a different view of the same truth.
Vision is recomputed after every legal move and accepted drop, so advancing, capturing, promoting, or opening a slider line changes what you know immediately.
What you see
A square is visible when one of your pieces reaches it under Shogi movement. A rook, bishop, or lance sees up to the first occupied square and stops there, so you see the piece you can hit but not anything behind it. The other pieces use the same movement shown in the Shogi rules.
Fog does not tell you whether an unseen square is empty or occupied. Below, Black's rook sees the White pawn it can capture, but the White king one square behind that pawn stays hidden until the line opens.
Private hands and drops
Captured pieces still switch sides and enter your hand as in Shogi, but only your own reserve is visible. The opponent hand is not sent to you, including its count; it has to be inferred from captures and missing pieces.
Drops keep Shogi's placement restrictions: no second unpromoted pawn on a file, no pawn or lance on the last rank, and no knight on the last two ranks. Because Dark Shogi has no checkmate, the standard Shogi ban on drop-pawn mate does not apply.
Into the fog. You may offer a drop onto any square your view shows empty, including a fogged square. If the square is truly empty, the piece lands and may stay invisible to your opponent until one of their pieces reaches it.
A bounced drop. If the hidden square is occupied in truth, the drop bounces: nothing moves, your hand is intact, and it is still your turn. That can become a retry loop: choose another candidate square, or choose a different legal move. The rejection tells only you that the square is occupied, not which piece is there.
Win condition: king capture
Capture the king to win. There is no check, no checkmate, and no warning when your king is attacked. The server allows moves that walk into danger or leave a threat unanswered, so you read threats from what your own pieces can see.
Timed rooms can also end by timeout, resignation, or abandonment. There is no visible checkmate claim to call the game early, so the main rules ending is a king actually coming off the board.
Play status
Dark Shogi is implemented behind development flags for internal playtesting. It is not a public pool yet: rooms are casual PvP only, and postgame review works after a finished live game. Use the persistent dev server when review needs to survive a restart. For the open-information base game, read Shogi Rules. For chess under the same fog model, read Dark Chess.