Can you make General Blunder win?

Published October 19, 2026

General Blunder is a xiangqi bot that plays its worst move every turn, so beating it is easy. Two challenges for anyone who wants more: get a draw, then make it win.

General Blunder is the xiangqi bot that tries to lose. Every turn it asks a strong engine about each of its legal moves and plays the one that is worst for itself: the move that gets it checkmated soonest, or, when no mate is in sight, the one that gives away the most.

Winning against it is not the hard part. We played ten test games against it with an opponent that picked every move at random, and the random player checkmated it in all ten. The quickest took 19 moves.

Random moves (Red) against General Blunder (Black). Red chose every move at random and mated on its 19th move.

The easier challenge: get a draw

General Blunder never resigns, and Mistboard has no draw offers, so a draw has to come from the rules themselves. That is harder than it sounds against a bot that spends every turn handing you something. The xiangqi rules page lists every way a game can end. Find the one that works against an opponent that wants to lose.

The harder challenge: make it win

General Blunder treats winning as the worst thing it could do, so it wins when it has no other choice. A move that checkmates you sits at the very bottom of its list, and it plays one only when every legal move it has would end the game in its favour.

The challenge is to steer a real game into a position like that. It searches ahead, so it steps around a trap it can see coming. We have not managed it ourselves, and we do not know how hard it is.

Show us

If you draw General Blunder or get it to win, post the game on the forum with its link. Every finished game on Mistboard has its own page. Running out of time, resigning or leaving the game do not count. Those are the ways it wins today without anyone trying.

Play General Blunder Read the rules

So can you make a bot that tries to lose win? The rules allow it: positions exist where every move General Blunder has would beat you, and in one of those it has to play one. Whether a person can walk a real game there, against a bot that sees the trap and tries to dodge it, is the open question. We will add the first game that does it to this page.