Garth Wallace wrote on Fri, May 29, 2015 09:38 PM UTC:
While researching something else, I ran across this discussion of
"Gungi", a board game that appears in the anime Hunter x Hunter and
figures in the plot:
http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/bbs/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=117295
It's apparently a chess variant with drops and pieces that may be stacked,
likely inspired by shogi. The thread is about trying to figure out the
rules from examples of play in the series (since the creator has never set
them out explicitly). Somebody posted a link to a Tumblr post that presents
a translation of a rule set a Japanese individual has come up with:
http://hiromalo.tumblr.com/post/74510568781/rules-of-gungi . The rules are
a bit fiddly (pieces have different movement abilities based on where they
are placed in a stack, and many have special abilities) but it may be
playable.
Of course, it's not clear if those match the "official" rules in the
series, or even if such rules actually exist, since the writer may have
just been winging it with a vague idea of what sort of moves are possible.
I'm not familiar with the series myself.