Crowded Xiangqi

Crowded Xiangqi (擠迫棋) is a variant of Chinese Chess which I invented after all of my cheap magnetic boards broke in half. It is played using the standard 32-piece set on half the board (a grid of 5 × 9 intersections).

Starting position for Crowded Xiangqi.

Specifications

  1. All is as standard Chinese Chess, except the below:
  2. The number of ranks is reduced from ten to five.
  3. Pawns and cannons start on the second rank.
  4. Pawns can move sideways at the second-last rank (i.e. after advancing two steps forward).
  5. Generals can fly horizontally (i.e. the two generals cannot simultaneously be in the central rank, where the two palaces overlap, unless there is an intervening piece).

The starting position in FEN is 

rnbakabnr/pcp1p1pcp/9/PCP1P1PCP/RNBAKABNR

where krncabp (in either case) stand for general (king), chariot (rook), horse (knight), cannon, advisor, elephant (bishop), and pawn respectively.

Fairy-Stockfish configuration

Crowded Xiangqi can be configured in Fairy-Stockfish by loading a variants.ini file containing the following: 

# Chinese Chess on half the board (5 × 9 intersections)
# Pawns (soldiers) are set to display as archbishops (via pieceToCharTable)
# so that WinBoard/XBoard won't disappear them on the last rank.
# https://github.com/fairy-stockfish/Fairy-Stockfish/issues/180#issuecomment-692910150
[crowdedxiangqi:xiangqi]
pieceToCharTable = .N.R.ABP.K.C...........n.r.abp.k.c..........
maxRank = 5
startFen = rnbakabnr/pcp1p1pcp/9/PCP1P1PCP/RNBAKABNR w - - 0 1
mobilityRegionBlackKing = d3 e3 f3 d4 e4 f4 d5 e5 f5
mobilityRegionBlackFers = d3 e3 f3 d4 e4 f4 d5 e5 f5
mobilityRegionBlackElephant = *1 *2 *3 *4 *5
soldierPromotionRank = 4

See Variant configuration in the Fairy-Stockfish wiki.

Naming

I have not named this variant "half-board" due to confusion with Banqi (半棋), which is a very different game where the pieces are shuffled (so there is a strong element of luck) and placed in the squares rather than at the intersections.

Cite this page

Conway (2024). Crowded Xiangqi. <https://yawnoc.github.io/crowded-xiangqi> Accessed yyyy-mm-dd.