Board and setup
Mini Xiangqi is xiangqi compressed onto a 7 by 7 board with a smaller army. The advisors and elephants are dropped and there is no river, but each general still keeps a 3 by 3 palace.
Piece movement
Every piece except the soldier moves exactly as it does in xiangqi.
Soldier: a soldier moves and captures one point forward or sideways, never backward. With no river to cross, it has that sideways freedom from its very first move, unlike a soldier on the full xiangqi board.
Facing generals are illegal here too. The two generals may never sit on the same open file with nothing between them, so a move that would expose that line is not allowed.
Winning and draws
Checkmate wins. As in xiangqi, a player who has no legal move loses rather than drawing by stalemate, and perpetual check or perpetual chase is not a free draw: a player who repeats an endless attack loses instead.
A game is drawn when neither side has enough material to checkmate, when a long run of moves passes with no capture (xiangqi caps this much like chess’s fifty-move rule), or by a repetition that breaks none of the perpetual rules. These outcomes follow from the position, not from one player choosing to stop.
A complete game
Mini Xiangqi has no canon of famous human games, so to watch the full army work together, step through a game in which Fairy-Stockfish, a strong open-source engine, plays both sides with full information. Notice how fast the chariots and cannons open lines: on a tight 7 by 7 board with no river, the generals come under fire far sooner than in full xiangqi.
Where to next
Ready to try the Mistboard version? Play Misty DMX in Dark Mini Xiangqi, the Fog of War variant built on this same 7 by 7 board.