I found an image of a Chinese chess variant
(http://www.hudong.com/versionview/idl,pAUWBxBWVKVEd2U,kVZZA) that I don't
recognize and wonder if anyone knows what one it is.  I have searched on
the Chessvariants' website but have found nothing similar.

From what I can see, the board has been lengthened by two ranks on each
side of the river, the extended range of the elephant inscribed on the
board, and the governor used for both sides as the royal piece in the
fortress; the generals (two per side) are positioned for a new function,
it
seems, outside the fortress.

Dear fans,

   Do you like to learn Xiangqi (Chinese chess)?  Please visit:

                http://www.chinese-chess-xiangqi.com

Although this site has an interesting table of contents, I could find no actual content at it.

By the way, my implementation of Chinese Chess is an example of what tweaking can accomplish when programming Zillions. It is much superior to the standard Zillions version, and quite a strong opponent. It is also possible to use  Zillions to build an opening database in a directory tree of Zillions games. The directories are named according to the variation ("Central Cannon (vs) Single Horse", etc.). To see that variation one simply double-clicks the game. 
http://hem.passagen.se/melki9/chinesechess.htm
/Mats

Hi,

I would like to propose you a very new Xiangqi online version:

http://www.jocly.com/xiangqi

Different skins are available for 2D / 3D views, and original / western pieces.

This game can be played on our platform (http://www.jocly.com/) but also embeded in any web page. You can even change the rules or the design by modifying our initial game with some local pieces/board tuning on your site.

Our goal is to let anyone make any chess variant for playing, testing rules, plus providing a set of tools to show or analyse games.

And we need experts to validate and expand our work :)

Any feedback would be much appreciated.

Any question will be answered.

Thanks,

jerome

A Soviet animation with Vietnamese screenwriter and assistants, based upon an Vietnamese fairy tale or myth (Russian language). Skipped to 1:35:

https://youtu.be/_7jsKUL4jDY?t=1m35s

The Lord of the Sky is playing chess with Mistress Drought for the Earth's water.

The game they are playing is clearly Xiang-Qi (as we know, in Vietnam they play the same chess, as in China, unlike Korea with a clearly different version). However, there is something strange about the board: on the place of the River, there are Palace-like crossed squares. Is it an actual way to mark Xiang-Qi board in Vietnam, or it's merely an animator's mistake?

I like all the possible (and exotic) endgames that can arise in this game. My chess friends and I that play this variant now & then are still at the stage of learning to avoid gross threats.

A valuation system given by H.T.Lau: R=9; CA=4.5; N=4; CO=2; M=2; P(after crosses river)=2; P(before crosses river)=1. Bear in mind that this is just for the context of this game, as naturally a rook would be of lower value in a chess-like game played with a board of these dimensions.

The part I am not very happy about is the description of the non-facing rule for the Kings in Betza notation, though. For clarity this should have been fcR, where the zonal restriction of the King would suppress everything outside the Palace, but can make an exception for moves that land on a King. But unfortunately that would leave fD captures inside its own Palace, when the King is on the back rank.

I solved that now by defining the forward slide as starting with a lame leap of 3 squares (to make sure the King gets out of its own Palace) before sliding as a Rook for the remaining part of the path. This leads to an ugly multi-leg description, first two move-only Wazir steps, and then a range-toggle ('y') to turn the Wazir atom into a Rook. It would have been nice if there had been a Betza modifier 'k' to indicate 'capture king only'. Then the move could have been written as fkR. But this is a very exceptional case, and it is probably not wise to dedicate one of the few still available letters for such an uncommon task. Perhaps it would be better to allow diacritical markings to commonly used modifiers to indicate they are somehow restricted. Like c" for 'capture, but only royals', and p' for 'must hop, but not over enemy pieces'. The full Xiangqi King move would then be Wfc"R.

Extra scripting

To get the above result two JavaScript functions that the general diagram script optionally uses had to be supplied:

• BadZone(x,y,piece,color) to confine pieces to a limited part of the board
• Shade(x,y) to define a board coloration different from the normal checkering

Both these functions are expected to return 0 or 1, in the latter case to indicate whether squares are dark or light, in the former case whether the piece is not allowed at the given location.

Noob qustion (again):Why the knight doesn't need an y modifier for turning 45 degrees? I mean what does ayfW means then? From what I understand in your spelling H.G., afsW means that you have passed (somehow unblocked) throught the dababah square!

The modifier 'y' is a 'range toggle', and does not affect direction. I introduced the convention that directions in continuation legs are always encoded in the K system, so that fs always means diagonally forward. If you really would want a second W step that could go to both the D and the F squares (which is rare, because these are non-symmetry-related paths),you can always write ffsW to prevent the f+s are parsed as one direction. (Or actually write nothing at all, because the default directionality for a continuation leg is 'all directions except back to the square you came from'. So aW would do it.)

Thus afsW is the XQ Horse, which still is a stepper on the second leg, while yafsW is an Aanca, (that cannot move to the W squares, but can be blocked there) which slides in the second leg. And afsR would be a 'Bent Rook', which can slide in both legs, and thus decide where it takes the corner,making it an enormously powerfull piece.

@ Fergus:

I don't know if this has been asked before, but it is not entirely clear to me whether it is illegal to draw by theoretically indefinitely repeating the position during a game, by a series of moves that involve neither checks nor any pursuing attacks on pieces. I cannot yet find a reference to this exact situation on this webpage (nor in a book I own, even). However, the preset I'm playing on right now states that "repetition is to be avoided" (not entirely clear to me that this is an official rule, or one just used by the preset, if it's even enforced by it).

Yes, repetition that doesn't violate the checking and chasing rules, or where both players violate it equally, is a draw in Chinese Chess (according to 'Asia rules'). Perpetually checking is considered a worse offense than chasing non-royals. So if both players are perpetually checking, it is a draw. If only one is perpetually checking, he will lose, even if the other is chasing other pieces, and has some check amongst his moves. And even if the checking is the only legal move he has. If both players are perpetually chasing, it is also draw. Even if one chases a Rook, and the other a Horse.

I think it is the 3rd repetition that counts, like in Chess.

Note that the rules are actually far more complex than what is stated in the article. For one, it is not just back-and-forth moving, but general repetition of positions, like in FIDE Chess. (Although, like in Chess, back-and-forth moving is by far the most common.) The game result is determined from all positions since the first occurrence of the position. Checking is easily defined, but chasing is quite complex. Basically it is creating new attacks on the same unprotected piece, where both attacking and protecting is defined in terms of legal moves. (I.e. an attack must be able to legally capture the piece, and a protector must be able to legally recapture after that.) If you force a repetition by creating new attacks alternately on different pieces, this is OK. If you alternately attack the same piece with different pieces with every move in the repeat cycle, you are in violation.

There are many refinements to this basic rule:

• Attacks with King or Pawn do not count
• Attacks on an unpromoted Pawn do not count
• The ability of a piece to (legally) capture its attacker is considered equivalent to protection
• A Rook always counts as unprotected against attacks by Horse or Cannon
• Attacks are not considered new if they only were illegal before the move because they would not resolve an existing check

In one game of Chinese Chess I recently finished, afterwards I thought I might have defended better if a certain 3-fold repetition of position was allowed by the rules (and thus considered a draw), if my opponent didn't avoid it, in one particular sequence of moves I'd thought of. Srictly speaking there was no chasing (or checking) involved, but nor was the repetition voluntary on the part of the defender (me) if I was to avoid losing quickly.

The sequence I wrote of can be descibed as: 1) I move a minister (elephant) away from my palace's central line, and thus the opponent's cannon (in his own camp, on the central line) is no longer attacking any points in my palace. To fight this defence, 2) he puts a minister of his own on the central line in front of his cannon, each piece in his own palace, with the result that his cannon is attacking all the points on the central line in front of his own minister, including all those in my palace. To defend against this, 3) I would move my minister back to where it was, on my palace's central line, at which point his cannon no longer attacks the points on the central line behind my minister (in my palace) since my minister and his both occupy the middle line, in front of his cannon. To fight this defence, 4) he moves his minister away from in front of his cannon, and once again his cannon attacks the points behind my minister on the central line (in my palace). At this point a repetition may have already occured once, depending where his minister went to, but if things keep proceeding in this fashion then a 3-fold repetition would eventually occur.

It's my guess, based on what you've written H.G., that this sort of sequence would be (by Asian rules) ruled a draw, though once again the rules used for the Game Courier preset I was using state simply that 'repetition is to be avoided'.

If there was nothing unprotected in your Palace that was attacked by the Cannon, this is indeed not a chase, and thus a draw. In Asia rules a mate threat (even mate in one) is not considered a chase in itself; you really must threaten to capture something on the subsequent move for that. A frequently occurring case is a King behind a pinned Advisor (e.g. by a Rook or together with Elephant by a Cannon), threatened to be mated on the last rank by a Rook. To prevent the mate the King steps aside, but then a check with that same Rook from the front drives it back behind its Advisor, after which the Rook resumes its original location to threaten the back-rank mate. This counts as 1-check, 1-idle, and thus a draw. Even if the mating square contained an unprotected piece (say the other Elephant), the 1-check + 1-chase is also allowed (under the general rule that alternately chasing different pieces is allowed).

Thanks, H.G.!

I'm wondering what the number of moves played in an average game of Chinese Chess would be (for comparison, I've seen 40 or 42 moves given for FIDE Chess). Does anyone know?