Mistboard updates

A player page for Zuo Wenjing.

The 2022 women's world champion, and a double gold medallist at the 2023 Asian Games. The page follows her title run in Kuching and her 2026 season, with five of her games on the board, in English and Chinese. All 32 of her games are in a study with the engine's judgments and lines. Read the article

A new look for the International pieces.

The International set is redrawn: one dark ring on both sides, larger pieces, and rounded squares on the Square grid board. On the Square grid, the last move now lights the square the piece left and rings the piece that moved. Change the set or the board in your display settings. Play xiangqi

Banqi now shows reveal odds.

The face-down tally under a banqi board now gives the chance of each piece turning up on the next flip, counted only from what both players can already see. It is on for both players and spectators, rated games included. Banqi boards also show coordinates when Board coordinates is on in your display settings, and a finished room keeps the tally of what stayed face-down. Play banqi

Fortress and Atomic Xiangqi are back on the drawing board.

Both are on hold while we redesign them: no new games, but finished games still replay and the rules pages stay up. Fortress needs a smaller xiangqi that keeps the feel of the full game without drops taking over. Atomic needs a cannon that follows the same rule as every other piece. Until then, drops live in Crazyhouse Xiangqi. Read the article

Why banqi needs a perpetual chase rule, shown with real games.

In banqi a chased piece often has only one safe square, so the chaser could force a draw by repetition. The article plays through the Mistboard games where that happened, compares what tournament rules and the popular apps do, and sets out our rule in full for anyone implementing it. Read the article

Pro player pages now have photos.

Seventy-five of the pro players we follow now have a portrait on their page, from the xiangqiqipu.com archive, which gave us permission to use them; each photo links back to that player's page there. Every player page also has their games, results by event, openings and official CXA rating. Browse the pro players

Looking for jieqi puzzles: what 50 games turned up.

We scored 2,939 positions from 50 jieqi games, looking for puzzles. Four passed the rules our xiangqi puzzles go through, and none of them turns on a face-down piece: the hidden-piece answers were bets, or moves the tile hardly touched. Where skill does show is in timing a capture a face-down piece can make whatever it turns out to be. Every example is on a board you can step through. Read the article

Secrets of Strategy and the Dream of Divine Strategy are online.

Secrets of Strategy, a Qing manual in two volumes (159 full games and 176 compositions), and the Dream of Divine Strategy, a Ming book usually counted among the earliest xiangqi manuals that survive, join the shelf with three smaller collections of folk endgames (the Lakeshore Collection, the Plantain and Bamboo Studio Manual, and Masterpieces from the Plantain Window, 1879) and the endgame half of Secret in the Tangerine (1632). Six hundred and eighty-two more problems and games, each on its own board with the book's line played out as the mainline and the original title kept beside the English one. Positions come from dpxq.com and are credited on every chapter. Open the studies

The longest forced mates in xiangqi, played out move by move.

A horse and a soldier against a general with both advisors and both elephants takes 65 moves to mate with best play on both sides, the longest of seven records pulled from xiangqi endgame tablebases. Every line is a chapter in a study you can step through, and five of the seven end with the loser having no legal move rather than in checkmate. Read the article

Xiangqi basic endgames: which material wins, which draws, and 46 to practice.

A reference table of 35 common xiangqi endgames, graded the way Chinese endgame manuals grade them, from certain win to certain draw, each checked against the chessdb.cn cloud database and shown on its own small board. The Practice page now has 46 endgames to play out against the computer, sorted by piece, wins first, then draws to hold, and the tablebase tells you when a move throws the result away. You can also set up any position in the board editor and play it out from there. Read the article

Banqi: a chase can no longer force a repetition draw.

In banqi a player could chase the same piece back and forth until the position came up three times and the game was drawn. Now a chasing move may not make a position appear for the third time, so the chasing side has to play something else, and a repetition caused by a chase is never a draw. A chase that drives a piece onto new squares is not affected. Games started before the change keep the old rules. Read the rules

Jieqi games now show what your face-down pieces could be.

In a live jieqi game, a row beside each side's captured pieces now lists what that side's face-down pieces could still turn out to be, with how many of each remain and the chance of each. It counts only what the rules already show, so it is on for both players and spectators, rated games included. Play jieqi

Master games now show the engine's advantage chart.

Game chapters in Mistboard's own xiangqi studies now open with the advantage chart, the move marks and accuracy, as in a game review. Chapters set up from a position, such as compositions, have no chart. On the player pages, a board whose game is in the broadcast archive has the chart under it: click it to jump to any move, or hide it from the board menu. See the Cao Yanlei page

Jieqi review now marks the luck of every reveal with a die.

In a jieqi game review, every reveal and every capture of a face-down piece now has a die on the board: teal when the draw helped, violet when it hurt, and more pips for a bigger swing. Hover or tap the piece to see what it was, how likely it was, and what it could have been. The move marks on a capture of a face-down piece now judge what the capturer could know, not what the piece turned out to be. Find a game

Jieqi now has a repetition rule: perpetual check loses.

Jieqi used to draw only after 120 plies without a capture, so a losing player could check forever and wait. Now the third repetition of a position ends the game. A player who gave check on every move of the cycle loses, as in xiangqi; any other repetition is a draw. Games started before the change keep the old rules. Read the rules

A player page for Tony Fung.

Hong Kong's 2022 world championship finalist, who scored nine points from ten in this year's qualifier for China's top league. The page follows his last fourteen months and his run to the 2022 final in Kuching, with five of his games on the board, in English and Chinese. All 47 of his games are in a study with the engine's judgments and lines. Read the article

Play jieqi by correspondence, one move a day.

The homepage has a new Jieqi by correspondence button. You get a day for each move, and if you are away, we email you when it is your move. It needs an account, and a guest who signs up from the button needs no second click: you join the oldest open game, or yours is posted for the next player who presses it. Play by correspondence

Forty-five of 172 classical xiangqi problems have only one solution.

An exhaustive solver went through every short continuous-check composition in a Ming manual, a Qing manual and a modern collection, asking whether the printed solution is the only one. Most of the rest have a second winning line somewhere in the tree, and nine records in the wider corpus are refuted inside their own printed solution. Every finding replays in a study. Read the post

KataGo is the new top Jungle Chess bot.

hzyhhzy's KataGomo, built on KataGo with Kouza's Dandelion 4 network, learned Jungle Chess by playing itself and now sits above Misty. It beat Misty 82 to 0 in 200 games, with 118 draws. Misty stays the default; KataGo is the stronger pick. Read the post

Crazyhouse Xiangqi has launched.

Chinese chess with crazyhouse drops: a piece you capture joins your hand, and on any turn you may drop it instead of moving, on any empty point where that piece could stand. Each side starts with its advisors and elephants in hand, and they roam their own half of the board. A drop may give check, and may mate. Eight bot levels, a friend or the lobby; the analysis board runs Fairy-Stockfish in your browser. Play Crazyhouse Xiangqi

Every game on Mistboard can now be played rated.

Sign in and use Find opponent. A rated game between two signed-in players now counts in every variant: xiangqi, jieqi, Banqi, Jungle, Flip Jungle, and Duck, Fog, Fortress and Atomic Xiangqi. Games against a friend or a bot stay casual. Find an opponent

The homepage starts a game in one click.

Pick a game, set the bot's level and clock, and press Play. Each row remembers your last pick, and Play again reruns your last game. The Play a person tab shows anyone waiting and every open correspondence game, with a casual or rated switch.

Games played on Mistboard are now free to download.

The new game data page has a file for each variant and month since June, about 1,100 games so far, free to use under CC BY 4.0. Jieqi, Banqi and Flip Jungle files record what each flipped piece turned out to be, so every game replays from the file alone. Game search now covers every variant too. See the files

AB-JChess is the new top jieqi bot.

An open-source jieqi engine by Huorongrong and Laoxu (Kouza), with its own neural network, now sits above Pikafish Level 8. It beat full-strength Pikafish 248 to 136 in 400 games. The post shows where the difference is, in the positions people beat Pikafish in. Read the post

Jieqi now has eight bot levels.

Until now every jieqi game against the computer was against Pikafish at full strength, and since August 23 people have beaten it 14 times in 596 games. Levels 1 to 7 are new and easier; Level 8 is the bot you know. The post walks through how the 14 were won, each game opening at the moment it turned. Read the post

1,000 games played on Mistboard.

Since June 1, people have finished 1,000 games here, nearly 800 of them in September, and jieqi leads by far. Thank you for playing, for the bug reports, and for supporting the site. Ideas go on the forum; anything private goes through the Contact page. Read the post

Guess the move where this year's professional games turned.

A new study of short lessons from the 2026 Chinese professional events. Each one opens on the move before the game turned, with both players named at the board: find a better move than the one played, and the reply is played for you. A wrong guess just takes another try, no button, and the hint names the piece to move. Try the lessons

Follow the Chinese professional events in English.

Broadcasts follows this year's Chinese professional xiangqi events round by round: event pages with standings (team leagues show their matches and table), a calendar of what is coming, and every finished game reviewed by the engine, with the advantage chart and the move marks. Games download as PGN, a link can open on a single move, and any game embeds on your own page. The Asian Individual Championship, October 2 to 8, already has its pages. Open Broadcasts

A page for every Chinese professional player.

Every player on the Chinese Xiangqi Association's lists now has a page: record by colour, head to head, openings named in English, and rating history since 2019. Titles (GM, IM, FM, NM) come from the CXA's grade lists and the WXF's international titles, each with its source. Pro teams rank by their top five players. Find a player

The xiangqi rules, rewritten for chess players.

The rules page now starts from what a chess player already knows: the six rules that catch you out, the setup, repetition as the site scores it (perpetual check loses), common mistakes, the three notations and a first opening. A famous game plays out in the page. Read the rules

A Jungle board, and animal pieces without the disc.

Xiangqi has a new board under Board: the square grid on a green lawn, a cream rug in each palace and a painted river, made with children in mind. Jungle and Flip Jungle turn green with it. The Animal (no disc) piece set draws the animal pieces without their cream disc, a little larger.

The Bamboo Fragrance Studio Manual and the Hundred Games Manual are online.

The Bamboo Fragrance Studio Manual (1800, three collections) and the Hundred Games Manual (1801), the other two of the four great Qing manuals, join the shelf with the Hundred Variations Manual (1522) and its Tongzhi-era sequel, the Wondrous Variations Manual: the oldest surviving printed xiangqi composition books. Three hundred and ninety-two more problems, each on its own board with the book's line played out as the mainline and the original title kept beside the English one. Positions come from dpxq.com and are credited on every composition. Open the studies

Pikafish on Mistboard.

Pikafish is the open-source xiangqi engine built from Stockfish, and most people run it from a download and a separate interface. Here it runs in the page: play it as it comes or start lower on an eight-level ladder, play it at jieqi, or hand it a finished game to review. Free, no sign-up, nothing to install, and it works on a phone. Read the article

Pikafish now runs in your browser for xiangqi analysis.

Local analysis for xiangqi used Fairy-Stockfish with a small net. It now runs Pikafish itself, at full strength on its own net, the same one our server bots play with: on the analysis board and in game review, with the gear settings (best-move arrows, several lines, search effort) as before. The net is 51 MB and downloads once; after that nothing you analyze leaves your machine. Fortress, atomic and duck keep Fairy-Stockfish, and the dark variants keep Misty. Open the analysis board

The Jungle tiger now jumps the river sideways.

Until today the tiger on Mistboard leapt a river lengthwise only and the lion both ways, the reading in English Wikipedia. The Chinese rule sets, and the digital versions most players come from, give both animals the same leap, so the tiger now has it too: on the board, in the bot and the analysis engine, on the rules page in three languages, and in the puzzles (one that the new jump refutes is withdrawn). Every earlier game stays legal as played; the change only adds moves. Jungle rules

Wanted: a neural network for jieqi.

Our jieqi bot is a hand-written classical engine, and a strong player beats it. Pikafish's jieqi branch has the search and a jieqi NNUE architecture but has never had weights to load; we trained ten nets on the classical engine's own evaluations and none beat it. If yours does over a 200-game match, it becomes the bot on this site, with your name on it. Banqi and Jungle are open on the same terms, and there is a best-of-eight against the jieqi bot for players. See the open challenges

The jieqi bot no longer knows which of your captures took its hidden pieces.

Jieqi reveals a captured face-down piece to the capturer only. The bot was being told its own remaining hidden pieces from the true state, so every time you took one of its dark pieces it learned what it had lost and revalued the rest. It now reasons from what a player in its seat may know. Its opponents' captured pieces stay known to it, as the rule allows. Read the changelog

Two of the four great Qing composition manuals are online.

Fragments of a Martial Mind (1800) and Deep Abyss, Wide Sea (1808) join the Elegant Pastime Manual: four hundred and seventy problems, each on its own board, with the book's line played out as the mainline and the original four-character title kept beside the English one. Positions come from dpxq.com and are credited on every composition. A problem whose recorded line does not survive replay, or whose diagram the engine reads differently from the book, is held back rather than published wrong. The other manuals on the same shelf follow over the coming weeks. Open the studies

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. Read the article

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. See the statistics

Duck Xiangqi has launched.

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. Study the rules

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. Open volume one

Patron checkout is open.

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. Become a Patron

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. Try an exercise

Misty is open source.

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. How Misty plays

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. Read the article

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. Read the article

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. See current games

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. See the developers page

Read the forum in your language.

Forum titles and posts written in Chinese now carry a Translate button for English readers, and English posts carry one for Chinese readers. A language model does the translating. The result is marked as machine translation, and one click brings the original back. Each post is translated once and then served from a cache, so the second reader never waits. Open the forum

Where the puzzles come from.

Three thousand five hundred real games went through Pikafish looking for tactics. It found 10,503 blunders and published 1,211 of them. The whole pipeline is written up, including the parts that throw work away: two thirds of every blunder found dies because the position had more than one winning move, or because winning it took one obvious move. Read the article

A ten-minute clock, on every game.

Ten minutes with a five-second increment is now on the time control list for every variant, and xiangqi and jieqi start there. A full board runs thirty to forty moves a side, which three minutes does not cover. The faster paces are all still there. Start a game