Learn how to play xiangqi from scratch — the board and river, how every piece moves, how you win, and the simple habits that stop beginners losing early.
How to play xiangqi: line up two armies of sixteen pieces on either side of a river, take turns moving one piece at a time, and win by trapping the enemy General so it can't avoid capture. That's checkmate, and it's the only thing that ends the game. Red moves first. After that you just alternate.
If you've played Western chess, half of this will feel familiar and half will quietly trip you up. The pieces sit on the lines, not inside the squares. A river splits the board. Two of your pieces are stuck in a little box called the palace and never leave it. I still remember setting up my first board and dropping the General into a 'square' — wrong already. Give it ten minutes and it clicks. Let me walk you through it the way I wish someone had walked me through it.
The board, the river, and the palace
The board is nine lines wide and ten lines tall, and pieces live on the intersections where those lines cross. Count them up and you get 90 points to play on. That's the first mental switch to make: you're not filling squares, you're occupying crossings, right out to the very edge of the board.
Down the middle runs the river — a blank horizontal band with no lines through it. It looks decorative. It isn't. The river decides where two of your pieces can go, and it marks the border you're trying to punch through. At each end sits the palace: a three-by-three box with a big X drawn across it. Your General and its two Advisors are locked inside that box for the whole game and can never step out.
Everything else — Chariots, Horses, Elephants, Cannons, Soldiers — roams the wider board. Take a second before your first move and just read the position: river in front of you, palace behind you, everything mirrored on the far side. That map makes the piece rules much easier to hold in your head.
Setting up your army
Your back row, corner to center, goes: Chariot, Horse, Elephant, Advisor, General, Advisor, Elephant, Horse, Chariot. Perfectly symmetric — set one half and copy it. The General sits dead center, inside its palace.
Then the two Cannons drop onto the third line from your edge, each one parked in front of a Horse. And the five Soldiers sit along the line just before the river, spaced out with a gap between each one — they're not shoulder to shoulder. Your opponent mirrors all of it exactly across the river. Do this three or four times and you'll set it up without a second thought.
How the pieces move
The General shuffles one point at a time — up, down, or sideways, never diagonally — and stays in the palace. Its two Advisors move one point on the diagonal and also never leave the palace. The Elephants move exactly two points diagonally, can't cross the river, and get blocked if a piece sits on the point in the middle of that diagonal — players call that jamming the elephant's eye.
The Horse is the knight of the game: one step straight, then one step out on the diagonal — but it's no jumper. Park a piece directly beside it, on the point it's stepping through, and the Horse is stuck. That's called hobbling its leg, and it has caught me out more times than I'd like to admit. The Chariot is your rook: it slides any distance in a straight line and captures whatever it runs into. The Cannon slides the same way when it's just moving, but to capture it has to jump over exactly one piece — yours or theirs — and land on the target beyond.
The Soldiers march one point forward, and before they cross the river that's all they can do: straight ahead. Cross the river and they earn the right to step sideways too. They never move backward and they never promote into anything else. So a Soldier that's crawled deep into enemy ground stays exactly what it is — a small, permanent nuisance sitting right next to the enemy palace.
How you actually win
You win by checkmating the enemy General. When one of your pieces threatens to capture it next move, that's check, and your opponent has to answer right away — move the General, block the line, or take your attacker. If they can't do any of those, it's checkmate and you've won. Worth knowing early: if a player has no legal move at all, that's a loss for them in xiangqi, not a draw the way it is in chess.
Now the rule that surprises everyone. The two Generals are never allowed to stare at each other straight down an open file with nothing in between — the flying-general rule. The first time I saw it used, my opponent lifted a piece off the central file and my own General suddenly 'attacked' theirs from across the entire board; I couldn't legally make the move I wanted. Keep it in mind, because you can use your own General like a hidden second attacker.
Your first games, and a few habits
Get your strong pieces out early. Chariots and Cannons are your heavy artillery — put them on open lines where they actually threaten something instead of leaving them boxed in behind Soldiers. A tried-and-true first move is swinging a Cannon to the central file, pointed straight at the enemy palace. Don't spend the opening nudging the same Soldier back and forth; every move should develop a piece or make a threat.
Keep your General safe and don't strip its guards for no reason. The palace is tiny, so a couple of attackers can cook up a mate fast, and your Advisors and Elephants are the shield that stops it. After each of your opponent's moves, ask one question: did that just create a threat on my General? Half of all beginner losses come from forgetting to ask it.
Honestly, the fastest way to learn is to lose a few games and look hard at why. Play the computer to get the moves under your fingers, then play real people online, and replay the ones you lose. Learn one checkmate pattern, land it in a game, then learn the next. Open a board on XiangqiPlay and play your first game today — the pieces start to feel like old friends faster than you'd expect.