Two players, Black and White (or 先手 sente and 後手 gote), play on a board ruled into a grid of 36 ranks (rows) by 36 files (columns) with a total of 1,296 squares. The squares are differentiated by marking or color.
Each player has a set of 402 wedge-shaped pieces of 207 types. The players must remember 253 sets of moves.
[...] Because the game was found only recently after centuries of obscurity, it is difficult to say exactly what all the rules were. Several documents describing the game have been found; however, there are differences between them. It is not too clear how accurate the rules given by modern sources for the game are, because many of the pieces appear in other shogi variants with a consistent move there, but are given different moves in taikyoku shogi. The board, and likewise the pieces, were made much smaller than usual for the other variants, making archeological finds difficult to decipher. Research into this game continues.
It is not clear if the game was ever played much historically.
the only video of it being played appears to have been a segment on a japanese trivia/comedy show where they recruited two professional shogi players to play it. the game ended after 32 hours and 41 minutes, and 3,805 moves.
they did not like it that much.
