Fencer: Cool. :) As wild a Chu Shogi can look, it's not the wildest one, nor the largest one of the Shogi variants. I've never played any of the other games, but I've read about them. I think I'll just stick to Shogi and Chu Shogi. Chu Shogi is a fairly large and complicated game. The pieces seem fairly balanced for the board, though the starting placement of them can make it take a lot of moves to get the back row pieces into action.. I've only played three games and have seven going at the moment. When you add the games, could you have the directionally marked pieces? Just like you've done for Shogi with the two choices of game displays, kanji or directionally marked? The kanji, symbolic, or pictorial ones that I've seen are too much trouble for me. I suppose Japanese players might like the kanji marked ones, but I can't make head nor tail of that writing. Especially for the much larger Chu Shogi with its many more pieces. I'm not sure who would like the other kind of markings though, but there might be some that do. Are you familiar with Richard's PBM Server? He has a few of the Shogi games on his site. Here's the link.
http://www.gamerz.net/pbmserv/gamerz.php
It looks like he only has three Shogi variants, Shogi, Chu Shogi, and Tenjiku Shogi. I've heard of Dai Shogi, Dai-Dai Shogi, and Small Shogi. I bet there's more. Anyways, I'd go with Chu Shogi. His Tenjiku Shogi doesn't have the directionally marked pieces, just kanji and pictorial, so that's probably why I haven't played it. Tenjiku Shogi has fire breathing monsters in it that can kill the opponent's pieces even when it's the opponent's turn! It doesn't sound balanced, but I won't know until I get a chance to play it.