One of the most expensive and niche retro games of all time, was Shogi Zanmai, published by Virgin Interactive in 1995 for the Super Famicom (SNES). The game is a collectors item and can often fetch prices of over $1k on the second hand market. One of the most forward modes of the game happens to be a collection of 500 Tsume. We decided we needed to play.
Over a series of Mondays, we played through the first 200 puzzles collaboratively using Telemelt, an online in-browser emulator created by Andy that can handle (among other systems) the Super Nintendo system from the 90s that can play this game. Having personally played through the first 200 puzzles, our thought was initially that we were experiencing something really special. Before the advent of emulators, it wasn’t possible to see or play these puzzles without shelling out the money to buy a copy of the game, and an antique system to connect to a TV (or to know someone with all that stuff).
Why is it so expensive? This is both a good explanation, and a great intro to the game.
So we set out to transcribe all 500 tsume into the shogiplayground format. You can play them all here.
⚠️ Caution: We don’t currently have the “mate in” information for these puzzles beyond mate in 3. While you can invoke the shogi computer connected to shogiplayground, this shogi engine does not know the rules of Tsume, which are subtly different from the rules of shogi!
One example of a pitfall, is the final Tsume, which is a mate in 25 (see picture below). If you turn the engine on at shogiplayground, you’ll see a mate in 11! Here’s a direct link. Note that while every move is check, this violates one of the key rules of Tsume, which is that Sente must use every piece in their hand (the solution in 11 has pieces in hand at checkmate). We will endeavor to encode the information about what Zanmai expects for the number of moves for mate, but to deliver the tsume more completely rather than more perfectly, this info may be in a future update.