Object: Capture (or convert to your own color) the opponent's royal piece (King or Emperor), or reduce the opponent to just one piece, or deprive the opponent of any legal moves.

The first player is called Blue, the second player Tan.

The board starts with the pawn rows already set up, but other piece positions are filled with Placeholder pieces. The Placeholders are replaced with real pieces as chosen pairwise by the players, where each pair of pieces can go in either of two locations on each side of the vertical centerline of the board. Blue first chooses the locations for the King and Commoner, and then, depending on whether or not the chosen locations have the two Kings facing each other, the rest of the setup is either mirror-symmetric about the horizontal centerline of the board, or rotationally symmetric about the center point. Tan chooses the starting locations of all pieces after the King and Commoner. You may also choose the random setup variant included in this file, where the computer decides the placement of the pieces.

To see a description of how a piece moves right-click on it to bring up its properties dialog. A brief summary of a piece's move is also displayed at the bottom of the window when the cursor is over the piece.

In Scirocco, every piece promotes. The promotion zone is the last 3 ranks of the board.

The current revision of Scirocco was suggested by ideas from Kerry Handscomb; he wanted to create a physical set for a Scirocco-like game for over-the-board play, but was discouraged by the extra pieces he would need to create for the complex promotion cycles of the Pawn, Guard, and Scirocco in the original game. This edition simplifies those rules.