About Xiangqi Arena

What can you do here?

Xiangqi Arena is first of all a place to play. You can play rated and casual games against other people, and each rated game changes your Elo rating, which then places you in a rank tier from Silver to Diamond. The preset time controls run from one minute to forty minutes for each player. You can also set your own clock for a custom game, or challenge a friend directly. Around the games we built the study tools that we wanted for ourselves. The interactive course, free with an account, has 92 lessons and drills, from how the horse moves to complete opening systems. The puzzles include a campaign, a rated ladder, a daily puzzle and Puzzle Storm, and the archive holds 32,204 games that you can browse by player or opening and analyse with the engine.

The guides cover the same material as the course, including the 20 opening systems and the 12 checkmate patterns, and anyone can read them without an account. The archive figures in the guides are counted from the games on this site.

Why we built it

Xiangqi is the most popular board game in China, and it is also widely played in Vietnam. For many years, however, playing and studying it online was harder than it needed to be. Strong players met in apps with old-fashioned interfaces, and most study material was scattered across old scans and videos. Players who do not read Chinese also found little in their own language. We wanted one site where people can play and study the game in their own language, and we wanted it to work as well as the best chess sites.

For that reason we planned the site in 4 languages from the start. Many of the game's players outside China speak Vietnamese, and Chinese players read about the game in both simplified and traditional characters, so a site in English alone would not serve them well. The lessons, the guides and the interface are available in each language, and the masters in the archive are named the way each community knows them, including the Sino-Vietnamese readings that Vietnamese players use.

Xiangqi Arena is built and run by a small independent team, and it is not affiliated with any federation or games company. Memberships pay for the site, together with the advertising that free accounts see on some pages.

Who writes the content

The Xiangqi Arena team writes every lesson, guide and player biography on the site. A biography tells the story of a player's career through the national championships and through the player's own games in the archive.

The archive holds 32,204 games. Of these, 12,003 are dated games from Chinese national events between 1990 and 2008. The other 20,201 games are undated: most of them are master games, and 3,040 were played by engines. Every game is replayed through the site's rules engine and checked for legal moves before it enters the archive.

If you find a mistake, please tell us through the contact page. A person reads every message, and in most cases it is the person who wrote the page that you are writing about.

How these pages are written

Every guide and every master profile shows the date of its last revision, and the date changes only when the content does.

Each opening line starts from the moves that give the opening its name, and the engine extends and tests it. The site's code draws the boards from those lines, and the archive figures are counted from the archive's games.

The Vietnamese and Simplified Chinese editions follow fixed rules for terminology and notation, the Traditional Chinese edition follows a fixed list of usage rules, and a correction is made in every language at once. The page on how we make this site describes each step.

How we make this site

How we run it

The server checks every move. Ratings follow the Elo system: every player starts at 1200, the K-factor is 32 for a player's first 30 rated games and 16 after that, and no rating can fall below 100. Accounts are free, and so is playing, with no limit on the number of games. Memberships pay for the site and raise the limits on study tools such as engine analysis. Free accounts see advertising on some pages, and members see none. We collect only the data that we need to run the service, and the privacy policy explains what we collect and why.

Contact

For questions, corrections, press enquiries or partnerships, please use the contact page, and a person will reply. We read players' bug reports and feature requests every day, and much of the site as it is today came from them.