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.
Where to next
Mini Xiangqi is the open-information base game. Dark Mini Xiangqi adds Fog of War, where enemy pieces outside your vision disappear and the general falls by capture rather than checkmate. Or step up to the full board.