No open correspondence games right now.
Correspondence games run on a days-per-move clock, so you and your opponent play whenever you have time.
Your correspondence games →Puzzles with more than one solution.
A solver found a real checkmate and the site told them to try again. The puzzle had two answers, and the grader knew one. Mate puzzles now follow the rule lichess settled on: every move of the solution must be the only mating move, except the last, where any mate counts. The 382 served puzzles that failed it are withdrawn, and the article walks through the position that started it.
The statistics count visitor games only.
The games-played number on the home page and the statistics page now counts finished games between visitors, or a visitor and a bot, since the site opened in June. Engine matches, our own test games, and the games we played before anyone else had found the site are left out. That takes the number down to about a third of what it showed; the other two thirds was us.
Chinese chess with one duck that both players share. Make your move, then put the duck on any empty point. It blocks a horse's leg, an elephant's eye and the file between the generals, and it works as a cannon screen for whoever moves next, so the screen you build is never yours. There is no check: you win by capturing the general outright, and the two generals may now face each other down an open file, where flying the general is a capture. Play the eight-level bot or a friend.
All six volumes of the Elegant Pastime Manual are online.
The Elegant Pastime Manual is a Ming collection of xiangqi endgame compositions. Five hundred and forty-nine of its problems are here now, each on its own board, with the book's solution played out as the mainline and the original four-character title kept beside the English one. Around sixty are draw studies where the source gives its answer in prose rather than as a line, and those notes are quoted as written rather than guessed at. Positions come from dpxq.com and are credited on every composition. One problem is absent: the line recorded for number 479 stops being legal partway through, and half a solution is worse than none.
The Support page takes monthly subscriptions now, at $5, $10, $20, or $50. A subscription puts a heart badge on your profile and does nothing else: no Patron-only content, no gameplay advantage. Core play and learning stay free and are meant to. Subscriptions pay for the servers and the development time. Cancel from the billing portal at any point and the period you already paid for runs out.
Practice the basic endgames against the engine.
Thirty-two positions from the book endgames, each with a goal instead of a stored answer. The engine plays the defense and grades you on whether the win is still there after your move. A chariot cannot break the full defense and three soldiers can, which is the sort of claim you only believe after failing to prove it. Endgames come first because their verdicts are the part of xiangqi an English speaker has the least access to. More sets will follow.
The Fog of War chess engine you play here is on GitHub under the GPL, and installs from PyPI as misty-chess. It is a build of the architecture behind Obscuro, the first superhuman Fog of War chess AI, whose own code was never released. The engine article now says how it works, what version 1.6 fixed, and what is still wrong with it.
What strong jieqi players believe about the opening.
Jieqi has no opening book. What it has is an argument, running on Chinese forums for years among players with thousands of games, that has never appeared in English. Five first moves ranked, why a face-down piece is a one-shot option you can waste, and the pawn push weighed against the crossed cannon on all six things you might reveal. Our own fifty games disagree with the ranking, and the engine declines the list altogether.
What the site does with jieqi, on one page.
The jieqi page now says it in one place: play the engine or a friend, get a review that prices every flip separately from every choice you made, and run the same engine in your own browser on the analysis board. It reads in Simplified and Traditional Chinese too.
Storm the Fortress: the Soldier crosses the river again.
Two rule changes. The Soldier goes back to the xiangqi rule it should always have had: one point forward on your own half, and the sideways step only once it has crossed the river. Crossing is the commitment it costs something to make. The Treasure now stays home for good, moving and dropping only on its own half, so the piece you are storming for cannot parachute into the fight. Engine self-play across five rule sets and a thousand games says the Soldier is what makes this game sharp: draws fall from 34% to 9% and a typical game runs half again as long.
Every game in progress, on one page.
Current games lists everything being played right now, across every variant: live games with their clocks, and correspondence games waiting on a move, each as a small board you can click into. Fog games appear as cards without a board until they end. When nothing is running, the page shows the open correspondence seeks and the most recent finished games instead. The games database moved to Advanced search under Tools.
Put a Mistboard board in your own page.
Any finished game, Mistboard TV, the daily puzzle and the xiangqi analysis board now run inside an iframe, the way a study chapter already could. Copy a snippet from the developers page; no key needed. The read API behind the site is documented too, as an OpenAPI document at /api/openapi.json: games, watch feeds, puzzles, studies and the ladders.
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