A browser game with text-to-speech and screen reader support
How to play Bari Bari Shogi.
This is shogi, played on a board of 9 by 9 squares, where two players take turns moving pieces. Files are numbered 1 to 9 from right to left, and ranks are lettered a to i from top to bottom, so a square is named like "7f". Whoever moves first is Sente, and whoever moves second is Gote.
There are eight kinds of pieces: Pawn, Lance, Knight, Silver General, Gold General, Bishop, Rook and King. When you capture an opponent's piece, it becomes yours to hold, and you can later drop it on any empty square. When a Pawn, Lance, Knight, Silver General, Bishop or Rook enters, leaves, or moves within the opponent's territory — ranks a to c for Sente, ranks g to i for Gote — it may promote. A promoted Pawn, Lance, Knight or Silver moves like a Gold General; a promoted Bishop becomes a Horse and a promoted Rook becomes a Dragon, both stronger than before.
Putting the opponent's King where it could be captured is called check. If there is no way to escape check, that is checkmate, and the game ends. Dropping a Pawn to deliver an immediate checkmate, placing two of your own unpromoted Pawns on the same file, and moving a piece to a square from which it could never move again are all forbidden, and this game will not let you make those moves from the start. If the same position occurs four times, the game is a draw by repetition, except that if one side has been giving continuous check, that side loses instead.
"Match" on the title screen is a ranked ladder against the CPU. You can freely choose your starting level (1 through 10); from there it rises by one each time you win. Level 1 is easy enough for someone who has just learned shogi, while level 10 reads several moves ahead; beat level 10 and you become champion. Losing or drawing ends the run there, but the level you reached can be recorded online. In "Practice", you choose one kind of piece and place it alone on an empty board, so you can freely explore where it can move. In "Online" → "Online match", you find an opponent in the lobby and play one on one. Whoever sends the invitation plays Sente.
The board can be operated entirely from the keyboard. Moving with the arrow keys reads out the square and any piece on it, and squares with a piece you can move say "can move". Press Enter to select a piece, and it reads out where it can move to; use N and P to step through those squares in order, then press Enter again to move there. To drop a piece from hand, press D. You can check whose turn it is and the move number with S, the pieces you can move with L, the pieces on the current rank with R, and your pieces in hand with K, at any time. The menu opens with Escape, the menu button in the bottom right of the screen, or by pressing Enter twice in a row on a square with no destination, or double-tapping it. Press H during the game to hear the full key commands.
In Settings, you can change whether speech is on and how fast it reads, black and white mode, sound effects, selection support, and text size.