Back to the drawing board: Fortress and Atomic Xiangqi

Fortress Xiangqi tried four new ideas at once

Fortress was played on a 7 by 8 board with the two palaces in opposite corners. It added the Treasure, a new piece that steps one point in any direction. A captured piece went into your hand, and you could drop it back onto the board later as your own move. For its first two months it also had veteran soldiers, which we later took out.

Each idea was worth trying. Together they made a game that was hard to learn, and the drops overwhelmed the rest. With the general boxed into a corner of a small board, one piece dropped beside it was often enough. A typical engine game ended this way, with most of both armies still on the board.

A redesign has to make a smaller xiangqi that keeps the feel of the full game, without drops taking over.

Until then, drops live on the site in Crazyhouse Xiangqi, which plays them on the normal board with the normal pieces and palaces.

Atomic Xiangqi needed an exception for the cannon

In Atomic Xiangqi a capture explodes. The piece that captures, the piece it takes and every piece on the four points next to the capture leave the board. Soldiers survive a blast; a general does not, and losing it loses the game.

In the first version the cannon exploded too, which made it the perfect defender: it could block a chariot’s attack and threaten back through the chariot. An attacker could often force a draw this way.

With its palace closed in, as here, the defender has no other move, and a repetition rule can’t break the cycle because both sides threaten on every move.

To launch it, we made a cannon’s capture remove only the cannon and its target, and made the side that keeps up a threat through a repeated cycle lose, like perpetual check in xiangqi.

That ended the loop, but left the cannon playing by its own rule: it alone can capture next to its own general. We launched before we had a design without that patch.

A redesign needs a cannon that follows the same rule as every other piece.

Both come back when they are right

We would rather run a short list of games we stand behind than keep two that need an apology. Neither game is dead. Each has one problem to solve. Fortress needs a small board that drops do not take over, and Atomic needs a cannon with no exception. When a version of either one solves it, that game comes back.

Play Crazyhouse Xiangqi

If dropping pieces was the part of Fortress you liked, Crazyhouse Xiangqi is where drops live on the site today.