I appreciate the mention of bobby fischer: i think he might have enjoyed a taste of xiangqi, a game different enough from international chess to wipe out a lot of the memorization that bothered him.Īs for which game is better, i don't need to choose. it's weichi (known here by the japanese game "go") that is more the game of the elite.Īs for me, i first saw xiangqi played outdoors in boston's chinatown, picked up the rules through the wikipedia, & still go back there to watch - and get whooped. xiangqi is really almost a folk game in china. just to get a feel for the popularity, check any decent sized chinatown on a warm day & you'll find knots of men - yes, mostly men - playing for hours. (and i'm not even counting other cultures - such as vietnam, and singapore - where xiangqi is widely played). I can't "prove" xiangqi is more popular than international chess but let me make this point: china has over 1.3 billion people, and xiangqi is more popular among them than international chess is anywhere in the world, including russia.
VERY SIMPLE CHINESE CHESS PROGRAM INSTALL
(Where you play in the squares, rather than on their corners, and the pieces just look like Chess pictograms rather than draughts chips with Chinese scribbles.) The WinBoard install also contains a reasonably weak XQ engine (MaxQi), and offers some assistance in learning the game through the possibility to indicate the squares where a 'picked up' piece can move to. Note that the Chess interface WinBoard also supports XQ, and does so in a Western representation. So Xiangqi games are often a race to mate you don't need a Queen there to perform a devastating mate attack. But the King is also much more vularable, having no diagonal moves, and being confined to the Palace.
(You have Cannons in stead of Bishops, and the Queen is lacking.) And the board is larger. So effectively tyou have fewer pieces than in Chess to attack with. So you need the Palace Guards (Advisors), and because of the presence of Cannons, which can jump over a one-thick shield, you need the second layer of the Elephants. You should really see these pieces as a replacement for the Pawn-shield that you use in Chess to protect your King in XQ you cannot do that because the Pawns start too far from your King, and do not form a closed rank. Despite the presence of these defensive pieces, the draw rate is not really higher than in Chess.
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