Philosophy

Sashité does not try to merge them: it offers them a space where their structures can coexist, collide, and inspire one another.

Asymmetry is not a problem to be fixed. It is a source of creativity.

These games belong to no one. Nobody owns the rules of chess, shogi or xiangqi, and it is healthy that they are implemented and reimplemented — in many forms, on many media, over many protocols. Each implementation is one more place where a game can be played, and one more copy that keeps it alive.

So we are glad not to be alone. pychess.org is a remarkable project: it gathers dozens of games and many of their encounters in one place, and it let chess face a xiangqi-inspired army and a shogi-inspired one before we did. Sashité is a small project beside it. It aims to complete the landscape, not to compete with it.

What we contribute is common ground on which traditions can meet: one way to describe a board, a piece and a move, whatever the game; open specifications that anyone may implement; and games whose records belong to the players who made them.