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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