Why are most of shogi's pieces designed to fight in a short distance?

Well, that’s what makes shogi interesting and hard. It isn’t all that strange as a mate is still possible. Also developing pieces is much harder which I like a lot about shogi.

The presence of drops makes current Shogi piece power level acceptable. Try playing Chess with drops for a taste of what Shogi would be like with long-range pieces.

@hydrophilic
GrandHouse has a huge 10x20 board with lots of long range horseys and like shogi you can drop back captured pieces.

@hydrophilic Crazyhouse is similar, but I was thinking of simply introducing the drop rule to standard two-player chess. The result isn’t unplayable, but you’d probably feel the pieces to be overpowered.

Ah, I've confused Crazyhouse and Bughouse.

A four-player variant for two teams where players on the same team can gift captured opponent pieces to each other, Wikipedia has the details.

Reconnecting