Three points kill your general from move one
A capture on any point next to a general removes it. Red’s general on e1 has three neighbours, d1, f1 and e2, and two of them hold advisors from the first move. So every advisor is a target that carries the general with it, and every piece that can reach d1 or f1 is a threat to the game, not to a piece.
The mirror of that is the rule you will feel first: you cannot capture anything next to your own general. A piece that steps beside your general is safe from every one of your pieces, and it stays safe until the general moves.
A cannon shot takes one piece
Every capture explodes except the cannon’s. A cannon that fires over a screen removes its target and itself, and nothing beside the target. The screen survives too.
This changes what the cannon is for. In xiangqi it is the piece that clears a file; here it is the piece you trade one for one and, more often, the piece you block with. A cannon standing directly in front of an enemy chariot stops it and threatens nothing back, so the chariot side has to find a plan rather than wait for the block to move. The engine’s best-play draw at two million nodes ends exactly that way: a cannon sliding along in front of a chariot.
A chariot on your advisor file is check
Nothing attacks the general in the position below, and the board says check. The rule: you are in check whenever your opponent could remove your general next move by any means, and taking the advisor beside it is one of the means.
You are not obliged to answer it, and the game does not end for ignoring it. It matters for one rule: xiangqi’s perpetual-check law. A player who gives check, in this wide sense, on every move of a repeated cycle loses. So a chariot hopping between the two advisor files to force a repetition is a losing plan, and because the board shows the check on every move, the loss on the third repetition is not a surprise.
Soldiers survive blasts, and a soldier’s capture explodes like any other
A soldier next to an explosion is untouched, which makes a soldier the one piece that can stand in a kill zone and stay. But a soldier that captures explodes with its target. In one of the engine games a soldier takes a chariot on c9 and removes the elephant on c10 and the horse on c8 with it, three pieces for a soldier, and another game is won by a soldier’s checkmate on e1.
Games end by explosion or by mate, in 46 to 145 plies
Of the ten decisive engine games behind this launch, six end with a general blown up and four with checkmate; the shortest is 23 moves and the longest 73. Expect a full game, and pick a clock for one: 10+5 is the default here.
Openings look like xiangqi’s. The cannon shot that took a cannon and a horse together under an earlier version of the rules is gone, so nobody trades cannons on move one; the engine opens Cb5, Ri3, Ra3 or Hg3, and the first explosion usually comes in the middlegame.
The bot takes a general on offer without thinking
The bot is Fairy-Stockfish with a patch for these rules, eight node-anchored levels, the same ladder the other xiangqi variants use. Its weaker levels are weakened by choosing a move other than the best one they found, and on the duck board that made a level-1 bot decline a general capture it could see. Here the loop checks for a move that removes the general before it asks the engine anything, so a general left next to a capturable piece is taken at every level. Weakness is in how the bot builds a position, not in whether it finishes one.
Play it
Eight engine strengths, or a friend by invite link. The rules page has the whole thing with diagrams.