Releases, status updates, and announcements from Mistboard. Subscribe by RSS
Crazyhouse Xiangqi has launched.
Chinese chess with crazyhouse drops: a piece you capture joins your hand, and on any turn you may drop it instead of moving, on any empty point where that piece could stand. Each side starts with its advisors and elephants in hand, and they roam their own half of the board. A drop may give check, and may mate. Eight bot levels, a friend or the lobby; the analysis board runs Fairy-Stockfish in your browser. Play Crazyhouse Xiangqi
Every game on Mistboard can now be played rated.
Sign in and use Find opponent. A rated game between two signed-in players now counts in every variant: xiangqi, jieqi, Banqi, Jungle, Flip Jungle, and Duck, Fog, Fortress and Atomic Xiangqi. Games against a friend or a bot stay casual. Find an opponent
The homepage starts a game in one click.
Pick a game, set the bot's level and clock, and press Play. Each row remembers your last pick, and Play again reruns your last game. The Play a person tab shows anyone waiting and every open correspondence game, with a casual or rated switch.
Games played on Mistboard are now free to download.
The new game data page has a file for each variant and month since June, about 1,100 games so far, free to use under CC BY 4.0. Jieqi, Banqi and Flip Jungle files record what each flipped piece turned out to be, so every game replays from the file alone. Game search now covers every variant too. See the files
AB-JChess is the new top jieqi bot.
An open-source jieqi engine by Huorongrong and Laoxu (Kouza), with its own neural network, now sits above Pikafish Level 8. It beat full-strength Pikafish 248 to 136 in 400 games. The post shows where the difference is, in the positions people beat Pikafish in. Read the post
Jieqi now has eight bot levels.
Until now every jieqi game against the computer was against Pikafish at full strength, and since August 23 people have beaten it 14 times in 596 games. Levels 1 to 7 are new and easier; Level 8 is the bot you know. The post walks through how the 14 were won, each game opening at the moment it turned. Read the post
1,000 games played on Mistboard.
Since June 1, people have finished 1,000 games here, nearly 800 of them in September, and jieqi leads by far. Thank you for playing, for the bug reports, and for supporting the site. Ideas go on the forum; anything private goes through the Contact page. Read the post
Guess the move where this year's professional games turned.
A new study of short lessons from the 2026 Chinese professional events. Each one opens on the move before the game turned, with both players named at the board: find a better move than the one played, and the reply is played for you. A wrong guess just takes another try, no button, and the hint names the piece to move. Try the lessons
Follow the Chinese professional events in English.
Broadcasts follows this year's Chinese professional xiangqi events round by round: event pages with standings (team leagues show their matches and table), a calendar of what is coming, and every finished game reviewed by the engine, with the advantage chart and the move marks. Games download as PGN, a link can open on a single move, and any game embeds on your own page. The Asian Individual Championship, October 2 to 8, already has its pages. Open Broadcasts
A page for every Chinese professional player.
Every player on the Chinese Xiangqi Association's lists now has a page: record by colour, head to head, openings named in English, and rating history since 2019. Titles (GM, IM, FM, NM) come from the CXA's grade lists and the WXF's international titles, each with its source. Pro teams rank by their top five players. Find a player
The xiangqi rules, rewritten for chess players.
The rules page now starts from what a chess player already knows: the six rules that catch you out, the setup, repetition as the site scores it (perpetual check loses), common mistakes, the three notations and a first opening. A famous game plays out in the page. Read the rules
A Jungle board, and animal pieces without the disc.
Xiangqi has a new board under Board: the square grid on a green lawn, a cream rug in each palace and a painted river, made with children in mind. Jungle and Flip Jungle turn green with it. The Animal (no disc) piece set draws the animal pieces without their cream disc, a little larger.
The Bamboo Fragrance Studio Manual and the Hundred Games Manual are online.
The Bamboo Fragrance Studio Manual (1800, three collections) and the Hundred Games Manual (1801), the other two of the four great Qing manuals, join the shelf with the Hundred Variations Manual (1522) and its Tongzhi-era sequel, the Wondrous Variations Manual: the oldest surviving printed xiangqi composition books. Three hundred and ninety-two more problems, each on its own board with the book's line played out as the mainline and the original title kept beside the English one. Positions come from dpxq.com and are credited on every composition. Open the studies
Pikafish on Mistboard.
Pikafish is the open-source xiangqi engine built from Stockfish, and most people run it from a download and a separate interface. Here it runs in the page: play it as it comes or start lower on an eight-level ladder, play it at jieqi, or hand it a finished game to review. Free, no sign-up, nothing to install, and it works on a phone. Read the article
Pikafish now runs in your browser for xiangqi analysis.
Local analysis for xiangqi used Fairy-Stockfish with a small net. It now runs Pikafish itself, at full strength on its own net, the same one our server bots play with: on the analysis board and in game review, with the gear settings (best-move arrows, several lines, search effort) as before. The net is 51 MB and downloads once; after that nothing you analyze leaves your machine. Fortress, atomic and duck keep Fairy-Stockfish, and the dark variants keep Misty. Open the analysis board
The Jungle tiger now jumps the river sideways.
Until today the tiger on Mistboard leapt a river lengthwise only and the lion both ways, the reading in English Wikipedia. The Chinese rule sets, and the digital versions most players come from, give both animals the same leap, so the tiger now has it too: on the board, in the bot and the analysis engine, on the rules page in three languages, and in the puzzles (one that the new jump refutes is withdrawn). Every earlier game stays legal as played; the change only adds moves. Jungle rules
Wanted: a neural network for jieqi.
Our jieqi bot is a hand-written classical engine, and a strong player beats it. Pikafish's jieqi branch has the search and a jieqi NNUE architecture but has never had weights to load; we trained ten nets on the classical engine's own evaluations and none beat it. If yours does over a 200-game match, it becomes the bot on this site, with your name on it. Banqi and Jungle are open on the same terms, and there is a best-of-eight against the jieqi bot for players. See the open challenges
The jieqi bot no longer knows which of your captures took its hidden pieces.
Jieqi reveals a captured face-down piece to the capturer only. The bot was being told its own remaining hidden pieces from the true state, so every time you took one of its dark pieces it learned what it had lost and revalued the rest. It now reasons from what a player in its seat may know. Its opponents' captured pieces stay known to it, as the rule allows. Read the changelog
Atomic Xiangqi has launched.
Chinese chess where every capture is an explosion: the piece that captures, the piece it takes and everything on the four points beside it are removed. Soldiers survive a blast; a general does not, so a capture next to the enemy general wins on the spot and you can never capture next to your own. The cannon is the one exception, its shot takes only its target. A threat to blow up the general counts as check for the repetition rule. Same set, same array, eight bot levels or a friend. Study the rules
Two of the four great Qing composition manuals are online.
Fragments of a Martial Mind (1800) and Deep Abyss, Wide Sea (1808) join the Elegant Pastime Manual: four hundred and seventy problems, each on its own board, with the book's line played out as the mainline and the original four-character title kept beside the English one. Positions come from dpxq.com and are credited on every composition. A problem whose recorded line does not survive replay, or whose diagram the engine reads differently from the book, is held back rather than published wrong. The other manuals on the same shelf follow over the coming weeks. Open the studies
Puzzles with more than one solution.
A solver found a real checkmate and the site told them to try again. The puzzle had two answers, and the grader knew one. Mate puzzles now follow the rule lichess settled on: every move of the solution must be the only mating move, except the last, where any mate counts. The 382 served puzzles that failed it are withdrawn, and the article walks through the position that started it. Read the article
The statistics count visitor games only.
The games-played number on the home page and the statistics page now counts finished games between visitors, or a visitor and a bot, since the site opened in June. Engine matches, our own test games, and the games we played before anyone else had found the site are left out. That takes the number down to about a third of what it showed; the other two thirds was us. See the statistics
Duck Xiangqi has launched.
Chinese chess with one duck that both players share. Make your move, then put the duck on any empty point. It blocks a horse's leg, an elephant's eye and the file between the generals, and it works as a cannon screen for whoever moves next, so the screen you build is never yours. There is no check: you win by capturing the general outright, and the two generals may now face each other down an open file, where flying the general is a capture. Play the eight-level bot or a friend. Study the rules
All six volumes of the Elegant Pastime Manual are online.
The Elegant Pastime Manual is a Ming collection of xiangqi endgame compositions. Five hundred and forty-nine of its problems are here now, each on its own board, with the book's solution played out as the mainline and the original four-character title kept beside the English one. Around sixty are draw studies where the source gives its answer in prose rather than as a line, and those notes are quoted as written rather than guessed at. Positions come from dpxq.com and are credited on every composition. One problem is absent: the line recorded for number 479 stops being legal partway through, and half a solution is worse than none. Open volume one
Patron checkout is open.
The Support page takes monthly subscriptions now, at $5, $10, $20, or $50. A subscription puts a heart badge on your profile and does nothing else: no Patron-only content, no gameplay advantage. Core play and learning stay free and are meant to. Subscriptions pay for the servers and the development time. Cancel from the billing portal at any point and the period you already paid for runs out. Become a Patron
Practice the basic endgames against the engine.
Thirty-two positions from the book endgames, each with a goal instead of a stored answer. The engine plays the defense and grades you on whether the win is still there after your move. A chariot cannot break the full defense and three soldiers can, which is the sort of claim you only believe after failing to prove it. Endgames come first because their verdicts are the part of xiangqi an English speaker has the least access to. More sets will follow. Try an exercise
Misty is open source.
The Fog of War chess engine you play here is on GitHub under the GPL, and installs from PyPI as misty-chess. It is a build of the architecture behind Obscuro, the first superhuman Fog of War chess AI, whose own code was never released. The engine article now says how it works, what version 1.6 fixed, and what is still wrong with it. How Misty plays
What strong jieqi players believe about the opening.
Jieqi has no opening book. What it has is an argument, running on Chinese forums for years among players with thousands of games, that has never appeared in English. Five first moves ranked, why a face-down piece is a one-shot option you can waste, and the pawn push weighed against the crossed cannon on all six things you might reveal. Our own fifty games disagree with the ranking, and the engine declines the list altogether. Read the article
What the site does with jieqi, on one page.
The jieqi page now says it in one place: play the engine or a friend, get a review that prices every flip separately from every choice you made, and run the same engine in your own browser on the analysis board. It reads in Simplified and Traditional Chinese too. Read the article
Storm the Fortress: the Soldier crosses the river again.
Two rule changes. The Soldier goes back to the xiangqi rule it should always have had: one point forward on your own half, and the sideways step only once it has crossed the river. Crossing is the commitment it costs something to make. The Treasure now stays home for good, moving and dropping only on its own half, so the piece you are storming for cannot parachute into the fight. Engine self-play across five rule sets and a thousand games says the Soldier is what makes this game sharp: draws fall from 34% to 9% and a typical game runs half again as long. Read the updated rules
Every game in progress, on one page.
Current games lists everything being played right now, across every variant: live games with their clocks, and correspondence games waiting on a move, each as a small board you can click into. Fog games appear as cards without a board until they end. When nothing is running, the page shows the open correspondence seeks and the most recent finished games instead. The games database moved to Advanced search under Tools. See current games
Put a Mistboard board in your own page.
Any finished game, Mistboard TV, the daily puzzle and the xiangqi analysis board now run inside an iframe, the way a study chapter already could. Copy a snippet from the developers page; no key needed. The read API behind the site is documented too, as an OpenAPI document at /api/openapi.json: games, watch feeds, puzzles, studies and the ladders. See the developers page
Read the forum in your language.
Forum titles and posts written in Chinese now carry a Translate button for English readers, and English posts carry one for Chinese readers. A language model does the translating. The result is marked as machine translation, and one click brings the original back. Each post is translated once and then served from a cache, so the second reader never waits. Open the forum
Where the puzzles come from.
Three thousand five hundred real games went through Pikafish looking for tactics. It found 10,503 blunders and published 1,211 of them. The whole pipeline is written up, including the parts that throw work away: two thirds of every blunder found dies because the position had more than one winning move, or because winning it took one obvious move. Read the article
A ten-minute clock, on every game.
Ten minutes with a five-second increment is now on the time control list for every variant, and xiangqi and jieqi start there. A full board runs thirty to forty moves a side, which three minutes does not cover. The faster paces are all still there. Start a game
Sixty-one games from the Division A qualifier.
China's top xiangqi league runs its qualifier in Hangzhou every August, and this year's three rounds are now here to replay in English, with the club names and the players romanized. Ten clubs, four boards a match, and an engine a click away on any position. The league itself starts in September. Open the qualifier
The Xiangqi World Championship, and why it is not the senior title.
Nineteen editions since 1990, eleven winners, and a title that stayed in China until last September. Every champion, an annotated game for ten of them, and the reason the Chinese national championship is the harder one to win. Read the article
Who Is the Greatest Xiangqi Player?
Nine hundred years of Chinese chess, and a championship only sixty-nine years old. Hu Ronghua, the men who came before the title existed, and the decade that was struck from the record. Read the article
Paste a game, get a board.
Import takes a xiangqi game in whatever notation you happen to have: PGN, coordinates, WXF, or Chinese move text. It works out which one you pasted by replaying it, then hands you a browsable board with engine analysis. Nothing is published, and the game travels in the link. Import a game
Brilliant moves are marked now.
Xiangqi review adds !! and ! beside the mistake glyphs it already showed. A move earns !! when you give material up and the engine agrees it does not come back. Blunders were never the only thing worth seeing in your own game. Find a game
A bigger video library, and one that reads Chinese.
The library is up to 61 hand-picked videos, ordered best first instead of by the date they were added, and it now opens in Chinese at its own address. Every entry has been checked against YouTube, so nothing on the shelf is a dead link. Browse the library
A head-to-head record on every finished game.
The review page gains a Crosstable with your record against that opponent in that variant, engines included, and Share and export hands you the game as PGN or JSON. Find a game
Chess titles count for verification now.
GM, IM, FM and the rest join the xiangqi titles. A verified title puts a badge beside your name wherever people are listed, and opens a coaching page students can find. Verification takes about two minutes. Read the article
Board coordinates, on every board that has them.
One switch in Display settings reaches the xiangqi family, the chess boards, and jungle. Xiangqi counts its files from each player’s own right, so the labels follow your move-notation setting and change sides when you flip the board. Open settings
Follow a forum thread without refreshing it.
Watch a topic and the bell counts its unread replies. Quoting someone now tells them, and every source the bell reports has its own switch. Join the forum
Studies read and write PGN.
Import a PGN to build a study, export one chapter or all of them, and add a finished game to a study from its link. The opening explorer sits beside the board while you work. Browse the studies
The Riverbank Cannon Problem.
Red’s opening cannon reaches the riverbank first, one move from firing down any of five files, and in fog you never see it coming. Whether that breaks the game came down to one elephant move, one poisoned defense, and a coin flip we priced with the engine. Read the article
Puzzles are rated by how hard they play.
A puzzle’s rating used to come from how many moves the mate took, which says little about how hard it is to find. It now comes from the position itself, so what you are served sits closer to your rating. Solve puzzles
Pick a flair for your name.
Choose a small icon that shows beside your handle across the site, from the variant markers and xiangqi characters the boards already use. The bell also reports new followers and incoming challenges now. Edit your profile
Both house bots play stronger.
Misty runs version 1.6 in Fog Chess, which closes a queen hang it used to walk into. Pikafish now searches jieqi to full depth; it had been stopping early, which made it easier to beat than it should have been. Find a game
Four times as many xiangqi puzzles.
The standard xiangqi set goes from 394 puzzles to 1,605, every one mined from a finished game and checked by the engine before it ships. Solve puzzles
Move badges and best lines on every reviewable variant.
The move-judgment badge now sits on the board for all six variants with analysis, not xiangqi alone, and a blunder names the move that refutes it. Jieqi reveal plies get the ranked candidates the engine scored instead of a line, since nothing past a flip is knowable. Open the board
Separating skill from luck in flip games.
Half the moves in banqi, jieqi, and flip jungle are dice rolls, so a chess-style review blames you for variance. Game review splits every flip into the decision you made and the tile you got, and the article runs that over 52 human-versus-engine games. Read the article
What Patron support will cost.
The Support page lists the monthly amounts, what they include (a profile badge, no gameplay advantage), and the billing and refund terms in full. Checkout is not open yet. See the amounts
A games database for xiangqi.
Search finished games from three sources in one place: the historical corpus, the tournament boards we broadcast, and games played here. Search the games
Perpetual check now loses in standard xiangqi.
Repeating a check forever used to draw. The checker has to vary or lose the game, which is how the published rulesets score it and how the course has always taught it. Study the rules
Mistboard works on a phone.
Every page was swept at phone width: a full-size live board, lobby rows that still name the variant, and real touch targets on the controls you tap. Find a game
Every composition has its own page.
Each endgame composition in the library is a page you can link to, and sharing one previews its own diagram rather than the site card. Browse the studies
Mistboard reads in Chinese.
Playing, watching, the forum, and the xiangqi rules pages are all available in Simplified and Traditional Chinese. Switch languages in the settings menu. Study the rules
Rated games at every time control.
Bullet, blitz, and rapid each keep their own rating now, instead of rated meaning 3+2 only. Correspondence stays casual on purpose. See the leaderboard
An opening explorer for xiangqi.
Open any position on the analysis board and see what has been played from it, with example games to study and the corpus it came from named on the panel. Open the board
Secret in the Tangerine, both game volumes.
Both volumes are playable move by move in English: 33 games with every printed variation. Open volume one
Rated xiangqi is live.
Choose Rated in the lobby. Your rating starts at 1500 and appears after it settles. See the leaderboard
Classical xiangqi, from the original woodblocks.
Read the earliest printings move by move, with every corrected misprint marked on the board. Browse the studies
Correspondence play has launched.
Post or accept a days-per-move seek, or send a friend a challenge link and play at your own pace. Find a game
An analysis board for every game.
Set up any position, import moves, run a local evaluation, or grade a finished game with server analysis. Open the board
Studies have launched.
Build shareable analysis boards: draw on the board, comment, branch variations, organize chapters, and publish interactive gamebook lessons. Browse studies
Mistboard TV is live.
Watch live games on the new Watch page, with a channel for every game and an Engines channel for bot-versus-bot matches. Watch now
Learn xiangqi from scratch.
A free interactive course: 20 stages and 111 hands-on levels take you from how each piece moves to the named checkmate patterns. Start the course
Xiangqi puzzles have launched.
Tactics mined from real games, with puzzle ratings, hints, and a daily puzzle on the homepage. Solve puzzles
Xiangqi has launched.
Standard Chinese chess on the full 9 by 10 board is now first-class on Mistboard: play the Pikafish engine at three strengths, or challenge a friend. Study the rules
Forum and global chat have launched.
The forum is open for game analysis, engine talk, and site feedback, with the homepage global chat available for quick table-talk during live sessions. Join the forum
Fortress has launched.
Xiangqi with a pocket: every piece moves as in Chinese chess, plus crazyhouse-style drops and the new Treasure. Play the bot or challenge a friend. Study the rules
Jungle Chess has launched.
Rank-based animal chess on a 7 by 9 board with rivers, dens, and traps is live. Challenge a friend or take on the Misty Jungle engine. Read rules
Flip Jungle has launched.
Every animal starts face-down on a 4 by 4 board and flips as you play. Challenge a friend or the engine. Read rules
Fog Xiangqi is open for alpha play.
Fog of War on the full 9 by 10 xiangqi board: each side sees only the points its pieces reach. Challenge a friend to a match. Read rules
Banqi is open for alpha play.
Banqi on an 8 by 4 board: all 32 pieces start face-down and flip as you play. Challenge a friend to a match. Read rules
Jieqi is open for alpha play.
Hidden-identity xiangqi: every non-general piece starts face-down and reveals as it moves. Take on PikaJieQi, our jieqi engine. Read rules
Misty 1.0 has launched.
Our Fog of War dark chess engine is now live to play. Play the engine
Fog Chess is open for alpha play.
Fog of War chess is live on Mistboard, with private vision, no check warnings, and king capture wins. Read rules
Mistboard is in alpha.
Casual dark chess is open. Rated beta is coming. Send feedback