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Meet jqe, the new top jieqi bot.
jqe is an open-source jieqi engine by Devin O’Keefe. Over 300 games against AB-JChess, the top bot until today, it won 171, drew 15 and lost 114. It now sits one level above AB-JChess, which stays on the ladder. Every game of the match is in a study.
Meet General Blunder, a xiangqi bot that tries to lose.
General Blunder is a strong engine playing backwards: it checks every move and plays the one that is worst for itself. Most turns a checkmate or a free piece is waiting for you, so it is a good first opponent and a fast way to practise spotting mates. Can you find them all?
Mistboard is rebuilt for phones.
On a phone the site now has a one-row header and a full-screen menu with every page grouped by section. Home opens on the live board and Play, game setup slides up as a sheet with Start game always in reach, and the footer's links live in the menu. A game now fits one screen with no scrolling: the board, both clocks, the moves and the action bar stay in view, and game info and chat open from the menu in the bar. On a computer nothing changes.
A player page for Zuo Wenjing.
The 2022 women's world champion, and a double gold medallist at the 2023 Asian Games. The page follows her title run in Kuching and her 2026 season, with five of her games on the board, in English and Chinese. All 32 of her games are in a study with the engine's judgments and lines.
A new look for the International pieces.
The International set is redrawn: one dark ring on both sides, larger pieces, and rounded squares on the Square grid board. On the Square grid, the last move now lights the square the piece left and rings the piece that moved. Change the set or the board in your display settings.
The face-down tally under a banqi board now gives the chance of each piece turning up on the next flip, counted only from what both players can already see. It is on for both players and spectators, rated games included. Banqi boards also show coordinates when Board coordinates is on in your display settings, and a finished room keeps the tally of what stayed face-down.
Fortress and Atomic Xiangqi are back on the drawing board.
Both are on hold while we redesign them: no new games, but finished games still replay and the rules pages stay up. Fortress needs a smaller xiangqi that keeps the feel of the full game without drops taking over. Atomic needs a cannon that follows the same rule as every other piece. Until then, drops live in Crazyhouse Xiangqi.
Why banqi needs a perpetual chase rule, shown with real games.
In banqi a chased piece often has only one safe square, so the chaser could force a draw by repetition. The article plays through the Mistboard games where that happened, compares what tournament rules and the popular apps do, and sets out our rule in full for anyone implementing it.
Pro player pages now have photos.
Seventy-five of the pro players we follow now have a portrait on their page, from the xiangqiqipu.com archive, which gave us permission to use them; each photo links back to that player's page there. Every player page also has their games, results by event, openings and official CXA rating.
Looking for jieqi puzzles: what 50 games turned up.
We scored 2,939 positions from 50 jieqi games, looking for puzzles. Four passed the rules our xiangqi puzzles go through, and none of them turns on a face-down piece: the hidden-piece answers were bets, or moves the tile hardly touched. Where skill does show is in timing a capture a face-down piece can make whatever it turns out to be. Every example is on a board you can step through.
Secrets of Strategy and the Dream of Divine Strategy are online.
Secrets of Strategy, a Qing manual in two volumes (159 full games and 176 compositions), and the Dream of Divine Strategy, a Ming book usually counted among the earliest xiangqi manuals that survive, join the shelf with three smaller collections of folk endgames (the Lakeshore Collection, the Plantain and Bamboo Studio Manual, and Masterpieces from the Plantain Window, 1879) and the endgame half of Secret in the Tangerine (1632). Six hundred and eighty-two more problems and games, each on its own board with the book's line played out as the mainline and the original title kept beside the English one. Positions come from dpxq.com and are credited on every chapter.
The longest forced mates in xiangqi, played out move by move.
A horse and a soldier against a general with both advisors and both elephants takes 65 moves to mate with best play on both sides, the longest of seven records pulled from xiangqi endgame tablebases. Every line is a chapter in a study you can step through, and five of the seven end with the loser having no legal move rather than in checkmate.
