Xiang Qi

Opening Position

Alternate Names

象棋, Chinese chess, Hsiang ch'i, Xiangqi, Elephant Chess, Elephant Game

No. of Players

Two

Equipment

The Xiang Qi board is a grid of 8x9 square cells (nine lines wide and ten lines long). The fifth or central row is actually a long rectangle called the hé, meaning "river". More specifically, the river is sometimes called the Chu River or the Han River as a reference to the Chu-Han War (206–202 BCE). Centered at the North and South sides are two 2x2 areas of nine intersections that are marked by diagonal lines. Each of these areas is known as a gōng, a "palace" or "fortress". Some boards will also mark the starting places of the soldiers and cannon with small crosses.

Pieces are played at the intersections (aka vertices or points), rather than inside the cells. Xiang Qi pieces are normally flat, circular discs with the ideogram for each piece emobssed on one side in the appropriate color (usually the two teams are Red and Black, but other colors are sometimes used). The pieces of the two sides are not only distinguished by color, but the ideograms symbols on them are usually also slightly different.

Pieces

History

Xiang Qi is not only still current, it is one of the most popular board games played in China and possibly even the world's most popular board game.

Objective

A player wins Xiang Qi by checkmating the opposing General piece. A player also loses the game if he is stalemated and has no legal moves available. (This is different than stalemate in Orthochess).

Play

The pieces are setup as shown above and alternate turns entail the movement of a single friendly piece. Generally, Red moves first in most modern tournaments, but there has been great variation in this historically and regionally.

Strategy

Variations

Pritchard(2) discusses early "Indigenous variants" played on a board of 11x11 points. The array was reconstructed from archaeological findings by Karl Himlay.

San-Kwo-Chi (Game of the Three Kingdoms) is a 3-handed version of Chinese Chess.

Co-Tuong (Vietnamese Chess or 'Game of the Generals')

Sources

  1. Gollon, John. Chess Variations: Ancient, Regional, and Modern. Charles E. Tuttle Co.: Publishers, 1968.

  2. Pritchard, D.B. The Classified Encyclopedia of Chess Variants. Completed, edited, and published by John Beasley, 2007. ISBN 978-0-9555168-0-1

  3. Xiangqi at Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xiangqi