What carries over
Every piece moves as it does in Crossroads Chess. Soldiers still care about the river, pawns still promote, cannons still need screens, horses still have blocked legs, and the king is still both a royal piece and a runner. Fog changes information and endings, not the movement grammar.
At the start, White sees only White's pieces and the squares they reach. Red's army is not shown just because it exists across the river.
Vision is attack geometry
You see a square if one of your pieces could move to it from the true position. A slider (chariot, bishop, queen) sees up to the first piece in its path and stops there. You see the piece you can hit, but not what stands behind it.
Here White's chariot sees the Red soldier on the file, but the Red king one square behind that soldier stays hidden. Capture the soldier and the information changes.
The xiangqi pieces make the fog sharper than plain line of sight. A cannon can reveal the screen and the target beyond it, because that is its real capture geometry. A horse loses the leaps blocked by an occupied leg square. The board shows what your army can actually reach, not a guessed ray through the fog.
No check, only capture
Open Crossroads Chess has check and checkmate. Dark Crossroads does not. The server never tells you your king is attacked, never forces you to answer a threat, and never rejects a move just because your king would be unsafe.
Instead, the king falls by capture. If a move lands on the enemy king, the game ends immediately. This is the fog version of the royal rule: the danger is real, but it is your job to infer it.
The race becomes a Try
In the base game, the king has to reach the enemy back rank safely. A back-rank square protected by the opponent is not a win. Under fog, you cannot know for sure whether the arrival square is safe, so reaching the far rank arms a Try and gives the opponent exactly one reply.
If the opponent can capture your king on that reply, the Try fails and they win by king capture. If they cannot take it immediately, your king has made it safely to the end and you win the race. A dark race is not just a pathing problem. It is an information bet.
Draws under fog
The draw rules are also fog-aware. In open Crossroads Chess, threefold repetition is charged as a loss to the side forcing it. In Dark Crossroads Chess, repetition is a draw, judged from the true position, because neither player can see the whole board well enough to own the cycle. The no-progress clock still draws after a long run with no capture and no pawn or soldier move.
Play status
Dark Crossroads Chess is available for invite games on Mistboard. Public matchmaking is still gated while playtesting continues, but you can create a casual room and send the link to an opponent.