Xiangqi rules for chess players: what carries over, and what catches you out

A chess player who sits down at a xiangqi board recognises most of it within a minute. There are two armies, a king-like piece to trap, a rook and a knight. The rules that are different are few, but most of them reverse a chess habit, and those are the ones that cost games. This is the full list, with the board first and the reasoning after.

The board

• Nine lines by ten. Pieces stand on the 90 intersections, not in squares, and move along the lines.
• The river runs across the middle, between the fifth and sixth ranks. It stops elephants and changes how soldiers move.
• The palace is the three-by-three block of points at each end, marked with a diagonal cross. The general and its two advisors never leave it.
• Red moves first, as in most modern tournaments (Wikipedia’s xiangqi article covers the history).
• The start position: chariot, horse, elephant, advisor, general, advisor, elephant, horse, chariot on the back line; a cannon on each side two lines in front of the horses; five soldiers on alternate points of the fourth line.

Every piece, next to its chess cousin

The values are the rough table given on Wikipedia, which rates horse and cannon equal at 4. Xiangqiful’s own lesson on piece values puts the cannon at 4.5 early on. Both agree on the trend: the cannon is stronger while the board is full of screens, the horse once it empties. Sets vary in their characters, and many use 馬 and 車 for both sides.

The rules that cost chess players games

Stalemate is a loss, not a draw

A player with no legal move loses, in check or not. The Chinese term is 困毙 (kùnbì). For a chess player it is the most expensive habit to unlearn. Steering a lost position toward stalemate hands your opponent the win. It works the other way too: boxing in the enemy general without checking it is a real way to win. It is also a reason to keep an escape point for your own general.

The generals may never face each other

If the two generals stand on the same file with nothing between them, the position is illegal. A move that would create it cannot be played, as if the general could fly down the file and capture. Two things follow. A piece standing between the generals is pinned to that file, whatever it is. And in the endgame your general controls its whole open file, so it can take escape points away from the enemy general from the far end of the board. Many basic mates use your own general this way.

Perpetual check loses

In chess, checking forever is how a losing player saves a draw. In xiangqi the player who repeats the position by checking on every move must deviate or lose. Official rules also forbid perpetually chasing an unprotected piece, although a chase by the general or a soldier is allowed. If both sides check perpetually, the game is drawn. The details differ between rule sets. The World Xiangqi Federation publishes the World Xiangqi Rules used in international play, and its manual explains the repetition rules through 110 example cases. A 2024 paper on implementing them in software used all 110 as test cases.

The cannon needs exactly one screen

The cannon moves like a chariot. To capture, it jumps exactly one piece of either colour, its screen, and takes the first enemy piece beyond. No screen means no capture, and two pieces in between means no capture either. So the cannon becomes dangerous when something steps onto its line, including your opponent’s own pieces. At the start of the game, a cannon moved to the central file already threatens the soldier on the far bank, because your own central soldier is its screen. Check every line a cannon stands on before you move a piece onto it, or off it.

The horse can be blocked

The horse moves like a knight, one point straight and one diagonally outward, but it does not jump. A piece on the point next to it in the direction of travel, the “leg”, blocks both moves on that side. A horse hemmed in by its own pieces can be worth very little, and trapping an enemy horse is a standard plan.

Some pieces can never attack

Advisors stay in the palace and elephants stay on their own side of the river. Neither can ever reach the enemy general. A side left with only a general, advisors and elephants cannot force a win. That is why the attacking pieces, chariots, horses, cannons and crossed soldiers, are what decide most endgames.

The rest of the list

• No castling. The general never leaves the palace, and the palace is its castle.
• No promotion. A soldier that reaches the last line can only step sideways.
• No pawn double step and no en passant.
• Soldiers capture straight ahead, the same way they move, and sideways too once they have crossed the river.
• The general moves only orthogonally, one point at a time.

How Xiangqiful handles the rules

Xiangqiful enforces checkmate and stalemate as wins. For repetition it uses a simplified rule. If a position occurs three times and one side gave check on every one of its moves in the cycle, that side loses. If both sides were checking, or neither was, the game is drawn. Sixty moves without a capture is also a draw. Perpetual chasing is not adjudicated, so the app is stricter than chess and simpler than a tournament arbiter.

The first time stalemate or a perpetual check decides one of your games, the game-over sheet explains the rule that just applied (“In xiangqi, having no move loses” and “Checking forever loses”). Each explanation appears once, in the first game that rule decides.

The Fundamentals track teaches the same list in ten lessons, among them “The Cannon and Its Screen”, “The Horse and Its Leg”, “Stalemate — the Chess Player’s Trap” and “Perpetual Check Loses”. Each one is a short explanation, a demonstration or a puzzle, and a quiz. All 80 lessons in the app are free. On the board, tapping a piece marks the points it can legally reach. Tap a cannon and the board also marks the screen it would jump over, which is the board’s answer to the question “how did that cannon reach me?”

The pieces come in three sets: traditional characters, western symbols, or a hybrid with the symbol on the character, so you can learn the rules before you learn to read 傌 and 炮. After a game, Pikafish reviews every move on your device, and Game Review names mistakes in these terms, such as a screenless cannon or a trapped horse. When you are ready for xiangqi’s own puzzle form, every move must give check, and stalemate does not count as mate; the post on Xiangqiful’s 902 mate problems explains where they come from.

Xiangqiful is free, with Premium at $1.99 a month or $9.99 a year (each with a one-week free trial) or $19.99 once. It has no online play. To play people, PyChess and Xiangqi.com are the usual places, and the guide to xiangqi apps for iPhone compares the rest.