Releases, status updates, and announcements from Mistboard. Subscribe by RSS
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