Xiangqi with every piece except the general face-down. A piece moves as whatever normally starts on its square, then turns over and keeps that identity. It is called cờ úp in Vietnamese and 揭棋 in Chinese.

How is jieqi different from xiangqi?

Same board, same pieces, same moves, same goal. You just do not know which piece is which, so about half your moves flip one over and find out.

The flips are random; what you do with them is not. Your accuracy score is built only from your choices, so a good draw cannot flatter it and a bad one cannot spoil it.

Can a computer play jieqi well?

Reasonably, not brilliantly. Ours is beatable by a strong human, mainly because no neural network has been trained for jieqi.

Can the engine see my hidden pieces?

No. It gets the same face-down board you do and is never told the deal. A test fails the build if an identity ever leaks into what it is sent.

The deal is random, made on the server, and told to nobody: not you, not your opponent, not the engine.

Where can I play jieqi online for free?

Here, against the engine or a friend. No account, nothing to install, and you can review the game with engine analysis afterwards.

Jieqi on Mistboard

Published September 3, 2026

Jieqi is xiangqi with every piece face-down. A piece moves as whatever normally starts on its square, then flips and keeps that identity for the rest of the game. You begin without knowing what anything is, including your own pieces. The rules page has the details.

It is a young game, out of Hong Kong and Guangdong, and it has spread over the last couple of decades mostly among Chinese and Vietnamese players. For what to actually open with, see what strong players believe about the opening.

Play the engine Play a friend

Plain discs are still face-down. Each one turns over the first time it moves and is stuck with whatever it turns out to be.

That is a real game on this site, not a demo, and every screenshot below comes from it.

Play the engine at 1+1, 3+2 or 5+5, or send a friend a link. Free, no sign-up, nothing to install.

Review your games

Ask for analysis on a finished game and the review separates what you chose from what you drew, which is the part a chess site has no reason to do. You also get the usual: a graph of the whole game, an accuracy score for each player, and every inaccuracy, mistake and blunder marked with the move that was better. It runs on our servers and takes a few minutes.

A game summary: the advantage graph swinging back and forth across the game, beside accuracy cards reading Pikafish 86 percent with thirteen inaccuracies, two mistakes and one blunder, and Guest 91 percent with six inaccuracies, two mistakes and one blunder. — The game above, graded.

It tells you how lucky each flip was

Half your moves turn a piece over, and you never know what you are turning over. So the engine works out what each piece that tile could have been would have been worth, and compares it to what you actually got. The gap is your luck on that flip.

A jieqi review move list. Move 19 is a flip carrying a dice badge reading minus 21 percent, above four ranked candidate moves at 52, 39, 34 and 29 percent with the played move marked second. Move 21 carries plus 43 percent, move 21 for black plus 6 percent, and move 22 minus 10 percent. — Move 19 played the 39% move when 52% was there, so it is marked. Move 21 played the best one and still got a +43% gift from the flip.

The percentage on each move is what it was worth before you flipped, averaged over every piece that tile could have been. The dice is what the flip actually gave you on top of that. So a move can be the best choice available and still come with a large plus or minus beside it: the first number is your decision, the second is the draw.

When your move is the top one, you chose well. Moves are only marked as mistakes when a better one was on the list.

Your accuracy is then built from the choices alone, so a lucky flip cannot flatter it and an unlucky one cannot spoil it.

And it runs in your browser

The analysis board runs the same engine on your own machine, drawing its best moves on the board as you try a line. Nothing is queued, nothing is sent anywhere, and it needs no account. The engine is open source, so if a number here looks wrong you can go and read the code that produced it.

The analysis board with the local engine switched on: PikaJieQi at depth 18 and 335,000 nodes per second, three candidate lines each with an evaluation, and arrows for each drawn on the jieqi board. — Running in a browser tab.

Open the analysis board

The engine

PikaJieQi is a fork of Pikafish, the open-source xiangqi engine, on its jieqi branch. Classical alpha-beta search with a hand-written evaluation and no neural network. What makes it a jieqi engine rather than a xiangqi one is that it treats every face-down piece as a chance node, scoring a move as the average over each piece that tile could still be. It only ever sees the face-down board, and a test fails the build if a hidden identity ever leaks into what it is sent.

It is beatable, and the game at the top of this page is one it lost. You can watch it play itself in these engine games. Almost all of modern Pikafish's strength lives in its neural network and jieqi has no good one: we trained a net and it never came out stronger than the hand-written evaluation, so this is an open problem rather than a chore nobody got round to. If you train nets, or know jieqi well enough to say where its judgement goes wrong, that is the help we would most like.

What you get

	On Mistboard
Play the engine or a friend	Free, no account
Full-game analysis	Every finished game
Luck measured separately	Every flip priced
Engine in your browser	No queue, no account
Studies with your own deals	Yes
Open-source engine	Yes
Rated ladder	Open, signed in

Common questions

What is jieqi?: Xiangqi with every piece except the general face-down. A piece moves as whatever normally starts on its square, then turns over and keeps that identity. It is called cờ úp in Vietnamese and 揭棋 in Chinese.
How is jieqi different from xiangqi?: Same board, same pieces, same moves, same goal. You just do not know which piece is which, so about half your moves flip one over and find out.
Is jieqi just luck?: The flips are random; what you do with them is not. Your accuracy score is built only from your choices, so a good draw cannot flatter it and a bad one cannot spoil it.
Can a computer play jieqi well?: Reasonably, not brilliantly. Ours is beatable by a strong human, mainly because no neural network has been trained for jieqi.
Can the engine see my hidden pieces?: No. It gets the same face-down board you do and is never told the deal. A test fails the build if an identity ever leaks into what it is sent.
Is the shuffle fair?: The deal is random, made on the server, and told to nobody: not you, not your opponent, not the engine.
Where can I play jieqi online for free?: Here, against the engine or a friend. No account, nothing to install, and you can review the game with engine analysis afterwards.

Start playing

Play the engine Play a friend Read the rules