Shogi RPG Tsumetsume Road

~ the obituary ~

I cannot read a shogi board. Not as a figure of speech about cultural distance: the pieces are kanji that flip over to a second character when they promote, and a piece you capture comes back onto the board playing for whoever took it. Tsumetsume Road was built for somebody who already knew that, or who at least wanted to.

What it did with that knowledge is odd enough to deserve the entry. You were an adventurer fighting oni, and your attacks came from solving tsume problems, the composed checkmate puzzles that Japanese players grind the way a chess player grinds tactics. Specifically mate-in-one, the shortest form there is. Solving one sent power into a spirit called a mitama, and the mitama did the hitting.

It was not a shogi game with an RPG bolted to it. It was an RPG that had replaced the attack button with a shogi position, and the design kindness is in what happened when you failed: you could still attack by giving check instead of mate, so a wrong answer cost you damage rather than your turn. Answer fast and you got a bonus. The store page sold it on exactly that, beginners welcome at one end and speed solving at the other.

DIG opened pre-registration in January 2016, aimed at a spring release, and shipped on 20 July. The last update anyone recorded went out on 28 February 2017. Service ended on 13 April, and no reason for it was ever published.

~ the case file ~

~ what the association signed ~

The Japan Shogi Association did not merely license its name. The announcement in April 2016 said active professionals would appear in the game as characters, and it named them: Shinya Sato, a seventh dan, and Keita Kadokura, a fourth dan. When pre-registration passed thirty thousand, the reward announced was a rare mitama modeled on Manao Kagawa, a women's third dan and one of the most visible shogi players in Japan outside the board.

The two spirits handed to everyone who started the game on launch day were Kagawa and Watanabe no Tsuna, a Heian era warrior remembered mainly for cutting the arm off a demon at a gate in Kyoto. A living professional and a thousand year old monster hunter, issued at the same rarity from the same roster. That roster is the whole game in one line.

~ the oldest man at the board ~

On 24 December 2016 Hifumi Kato, a ninth dan and at seventy-six the oldest professional still playing, sat down for a Ryuo-sen ranking game against a fourteen year old fourth dan named Sota Fujii. It was Fujii's first official game as a professional. The sixty-two year gap between them was the widest ever recorded in a Japanese professional match, and Fujii won it in a hundred and ten moves.

Two days later, on 26 December, Tsumetsume Road launched its New Year event, a collaboration with Kato. The game had under four months left. Kato outlasted it by a long way, with a professional career that ran sixty-three years in total, and died on 22 January 2026 at the age of eighty-six.

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