The rules of the game do not require the traditional board, and western players may find the game less forbidding with more familiar equipment. Besides the traditional board described above, a checkered board with western pieces is also shown. SetupĪt the beginning of the game, pieces are placed like so. These markings are not present on all commercial boards, and they have no bearing on the course of the game. The above board shows various L-shaped markings in order to mark the setup points of Pawns and Cannons. Throughout the game, each player's General and Advisers must remain in the palace. Each is distinguished by an x-shaped cross connecting its four corner points. Two palaces are positioned at opposite sides of the board. It is believed that this type of piece placement is borrowed from WeiQi (known in the west as Go). The board appears very similar to other uncheckered boards, such as the boards Shogi and Chaturanga are played on, but instead of going in the space demarcated by the lines, pieces go on the intersections. Other pieces can pass over it as though it's not there, Pawns gaining the ability to move sideways after crossing it. The vertical lines are interrupted in the middle, so that the board appears as two grids of five horizontal lines by nine veritical lines. The traditional Xiangqi board is a grid of ten horizontal lines and nine vertical lines. In Xiangqi, a player with no legal move loses. In Chess, stalemate is one condition in the game, among others, that leads to a draw. Stalemate is when a player has no legal move. To avoid any confusion among Chess players who consider stalemate synonymous with draw, let me spell out the difference. Unlike Chess, where a stalemate counts as a draw, a stalemate in Xiangqi wins the game for the player delivering it. You have checkmated your opponent when you have attacked his General (placed it in check), and he cannot eliminate the check with any move. In Xiangqi, the piece to checkmate is the opponent's General. The object of Xiangqi is to either checkmate or stalemate your opponent. It differs from Chess in the object, the board, the setup, the pieces, and some of the rules. Each player controls an army of pieces, moves one piece at a time, and tries to get the opponent's royal piece.
#Chinese chess tactics how to
If you know how to play Chess, the rules of Xiangqi will be familiar. There is much literature on Xiangqi, most of it in Chinese.īooks available in English and other languages. The word may have originally referred to the game now called Weiqi or Go, though in current usage it just means strategy board game. The second means strategy game, and it also signifies one of the four arts - qin (music), hua (brush painting), shu (calligraphy) and qí (strategy games) - that a Chinese gentleman scholar was supposed to be proficient in. The first character is used in the game for the Elephant piece. ( xiàng) ( qí) translates to Elephant Game. On the web and in recent literature, the simplified Pinyin spelling of Xiangqi has become standard, and that spelling will be used here. While many were probably ignorant of the official romanizations, Sloan favors his spelling for being more phonetically accurate. In the literature on the game, it has been transliterated in many other ways, including tseung k'i (Culin), Chong-Kie (Suzuki), Siang k‘i (Murray), tseung-ki (Davidson), Hsang Chi (Gollon), and Shiang-Chi (Sloan, "History of Chinese Chess"). Its Cantonese pronunciation is jun kay, which is romanized in the jyutping system as zoeng6 kei4*2. The Mandarin pronunciation of 象棋 is something like shawn chee, and this gets romanized as Xiàng Qí in Pinyin, as Hiangk'i in EFEO, as HsiangCh'i in Wade-Giles, and as SyangChi in Yale. The two games are played by approximately the same rules, and except for the Cannon, every Xiangqi piece is very similar to the Chaturanga piece that occupies roughly the same position and bears a name similar or identical in meaning. Whatever the relation between Xiangqi and Chaturanga, it seems highly likely that they are related, for the similarities between them are too hard to explain as just coincidences. It is commonly believed that both Xiangqi and Orthodox Chess derive from the original Indian game of Chanturanga, but some, such as Sam Sloan and David Li, maintain that Chess is actually Chinese in origin. Xiangqi has remained in its present form for centuries. It is currently played by millions (or tens of millions) in China, Taiwan, Thailand, Singapore, Vietnam, Hong Kong and other Asian countries.
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Xiangqi, known in the west as Chinese Chess, is an extremely popular game in the Eastern Hemisphere.
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First Syllabus on Xiangqi - Chinese Chess 1.Traditional Chinese Pieces for Chinese Chess and Variants.National Standard Chinese Pieces for Chinese Chess and Variants.Xiangqi (象棋): Chinese Chess – The Chess Variant Pages