Chinese Chess (Xiangqi)

Chinese Chess, also called Xiangqi, with a full-strength engine running on your phone.

The opponent is Pikafish, the NNUE engine that leads modern Xiangqi play. It ships inside the app and runs entirely on the device, so there is no account to create and nothing to wait for.

The interface follows your phone's language, English or Chinese. In English the moves are written in WXF notation (C2=5, H8+7), and the pieces keep their Chinese characters, as on a real board.

WAYS TO PLAY
- Take red and move first against the engine
- Take black and answer its opening
- Two players sharing one phone
- Play a friend online with a room code, phone or web
- Watch the engine play itself, at any level
- Endgame practice: thirty studies from the classical manuals

EIGHT LEVELS
Novice, Learner, Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced, Professional, Master and Grandmaster. Novice and Learner are for people who have just learnt the moves: the engine weighs its few best moves and sometimes plays a weaker one, though it never misses a mate. From Beginner up, a level fixes how deep the engine may search, from three plies at Beginner to twenty at Master. Grandmaster lifts the limit and gives the engine ten seconds a move, which is past human strength. On first launch the app asks how well you play.

PRACTICE OR CHALLENGE
In practice games you may ask for hints and take moves back, and your rating is left alone. Challenge games count towards your rating, with no hints and no take-backs.

ENDGAME PRACTICE
Thirty positions taken unaltered from the classical manuals: Shiqing Yaqu, Lanke Shenji, Mengru Shenji, Taolue Yuanji and Juzhong Mi. Red moves first and mates in two to twelve moves against the best defence. Run out of moves and you can try again or step through the solution; solved studies are ticked off.

AFTER THE GAME
Review a finished game with a graph of how it went, in pawns, under the board. Drag along the graph and the board follows move by move. Every position shows the engine's move as an arrow; mistakes and blunders, confirmed by a deeper search, are marked on the curve, and you can jump from one to the next. The engine analyses the game while you think during play, so the review is ready almost at once.

WHILE YOU PLAY
- Captured pieces sit on each side's name card
- The evaluation, in pawns or moves to mate, stays hidden unless you turn it on
- Replay the game a step at a time from a bar under the board, or export the moves as text
- Ask for a hint and the engine marks the move it would choose
- Pick up the game you left unfinished
- Perpetual check and threefold repetition are judged the way a tournament judges them

THE BOARD
A pale jade board on an ink-wash landscape, with the pieces in a brush-style Kai typeface, red in cinnabar and black in ink. It opens in a smoky ink dark theme, Night Jade; switch to light or follow your system setting. Board and pieces are drawn in code, so the lines stay sharp on any screen. The whole game sits on one portrait page.

YOUR RECORD
A rating ladder follows your challenge games and awards a title as it climbs, from newcomer up to master.

PRIVATE BY DESIGN
Everything but playing a friend online works without a connection. No ads, no tracking, no analytics, no sign-up. An online game is stored only for you and your friend, under an anonymous ID.

Recent changes:
Repeated positions are now judged by the rules of xiangqi instead of simply declared a draw. When a position comes up a third time, the app looks at every move of that cycle: a side that checks on every move loses by perpetual check, a side that chases a piece on every move loses by perpetual chase, and only a plain repetition is a draw. The AI avoids repetitions it would lose. The web version judges the same way, so online games agree on both sides.