Chinese Chess, or xiangqi, is perhaps the most popular board game in the world, played by millions of people in China, other parts of Asia, and wherever Chinese have settled. In recent years it has started to become better known among non-Chinese. Westernized sets of boards and pieces sometimes show up in specialty games shops, and there have been several computer versions.

For sheer fun, it’s hard to think of a two-player board game that matches Chinese chess. It exercises the brain in much the same way as Western (international) chess, but it is much faster moving.

Some authorities insist that China is the birthplace of chess. Chinese chess was fully developed by the end of the Song dynasty (960-1279), and then spread to Japan and Korea, and other parts of the world.

The modern game may even contain traces of an ancient system of divination in which pieces representing celestial bodies were moved about a map of the cosmos, divided by the Milky Way. The Milky Way is called a river by the Chinese, and the chessboard has a river running through it.

Basic Rules

Player takes alternate turns. In each turn, a player must make a single move with a single piece. If a piece ends its move on a point occupied by an enemy piece, that piece is captured and permanently removed from play.

The object of the game is to capture the enemy general. The game is won as soon as one player can make no move that prevents capture of his general. This is checkmate. Stalemate, where one player has no legal move but is not in check, is a win for the last player to move.

The board

As can be seen from the diagram, the board is very different from the one used for Western chess. The pieces are played on the lines, not on the squares; the playing field is therefore a grid of nine files (numbered here for traditional game notation) and ten ranks, making it 40 percent larger than the Western chessboard.