I was thinking; maybe chess.com should have Shogi and other variants? Chess and Shogi etc are related to each other, and we already have Chess960. So why not other variants? It would certainly make this site a lot more interesting and maybe even attract a wider audience.

What do you think?

Shogi is not a chess varient

Yes it is. It's also called Japanese chess.

No, a chess varient is a game that uses the same mechanics and pieces as chess. Such as Fisher Random. Shogi is just a game that was created after chess that is similar. Chess may have inspired it but that does not mean it is a varient.

It belongs to the samy family of board games as western chess. It's even called chess. So it's a variant in its own right.

Chess960 hasn't been introduced to Live Chess yet, still waiting and waiting for it..

I would love to give those games a try, in a place where my rating would matter (which is Chess.com, there are some Xiangqi sites on the web but they all pale in comparison to here), but sadly, I doubt it'll ever happen.

Shogi is incredible.  Probably much more complex than chess... which isn't necessarily a good thing because people complain about the learning curve for chess as it is.  I find Xiangqi kind of boring.  The pieces are all so restricted (the elephants not even being able to enter the opposing side is the worst of this) and pawns just get... stuck if you aren't careful.  The only really cool thing it has going for it is cannons.  Cannons are rad. 

I don't know if you're familiar with Arimaa but it's this game some awesome guy invented around the time computers were just starting to beat the best humans.  It's designed to be incredibly easy to learn (5 minutes), possess rich high level play, and inherently difficult for computers to excel at.  The main reason I mention it is because he's done a lot to promote his game which means it has a very nice site where you can play other people online (live or correspondence) and plenty of resources for learning more for a game so new.  There's a cash prize if anyone can develop a program to defeat the top human players in X amount of time. Sadly I think that preventing computers from being great at it is the one design goal he definitely did not meet.  The computers may not be able to beat the top players, but they are nontheless very good and I reckon it's only a matter of time before they can.

I think Go is the only popular game that will survive a while before being dominated by computers.  I hear it's one of the richest in terms of strategy as well.  But I think out of all of them it catches my interest the least.  There is just something kind of boring about a game with only colored tiles and one move a turn on a square grid.  Where in chess you start to recognize patterns with, says, queens and knights coordinating against the enemy king, in Go you start to recognize patterns of... dots.

No matter what strategy game we each choose we're all unified in the desire to waste time in a really intelligent way.  And that, to me, is beautiful.  I'm just happy people at some point thought of all these games.

Shogi is good. We Japanese make best things in this world, so our games rock. Do you have持驹 in chess? Suck. Can you capture the opponent's soldier and use them as your own? Suck. How long have I got to keep on doing you such a favor to advice you turn to Shogi before you abandon such obsolate game as Chess or Xiangqi?

Shogi is not just a game, but also a good way to learn the wonderful Japanese cuture. If you are not a Japanese and get no opportunity to learn Shogi, it''s your Misfortune.