About Play Chinese Chess

Play Chinese Chess lets you play xiangqi in your browser, free, with no account. The computer opponent runs on this site's own xiangqi engine, written in TypeScript. The engine uses alpha-beta search, which skips branches already proven worse than a move it has found. There are three levels: easy, medium, and hard.

Statika AS makes Play Chinese Chess. Statika AS is a company based in Norway. Contact the team at kontakt@statika-as.com with questions or bug reports.

This site stores your game and settings in your browser's local storage. No data goes to a server, and no account is needed to save progress. Clearing your browser's site data removes this saved information.

The engine searches about 400,000 positions a second in your browser. Easy looks three moves ahead and plays a random quiet move now and then, so a beginner can win. Medium thinks for one second and reaches about six half-moves. Hard thinks for three seconds and reaches about seven.

The engine has no opening book. It picks among the best moves in the first eight half-moves, so no two games start the same way. It does not resign, and it accepts a draw offer only when its own search rates the position as level or worse.

The engine's move generator is tested against known position counts from the start position: 44 moves after one half-move, 1,920 after two, and 79,666 after three. Separate tests cover each piece rule, the flying general, checkmate, stalemate, perpetual check, and repetition.

The rule pages were checked sentence by sentence against the Xiangqi article on Wikipedia and the World Xiangqi Federation notation rules. Each page shows the date it was last updated.