Banqi (Dark Chess) Rules

Overview

Banqi is a two-player board game played with the 32 pieces of a Xiangqi (Chinese Chess) set on half a board. At the start every piece is face down; the players take turns flipping, moving and capturing pieces, and a piece's rank decides what it can capture.

• Goal: Capture all of your opponent's pieces, or leave your opponent with no legal move on their turn.
• Game: From all 32 pieces face down until there is a win, loss or draw.

Board and Pieces

The board has 32 squares (4 × 8). Pieces sit inside the squares (not on the line intersections). At the start, all 32 pieces are face down and placed at random, filling every square with no empty spaces.

Opening position (upright, 4 columns × 8 rows): every square holds a face-down piece.

Each side has 16 pieces. Red and Black pieces are written with different characters but have the same ranks:

Terms: a piece that is still face down is a face-down piece (暗子); a piece that has been turned over is a face-up piece (明子).

How to Play

Picking who moves first. Before the game, five pieces — General, Advisor, Elephant, Chariot and Horse — are laid face down in a row. Each player picks one (not the same one), both are revealed together, and the higher piece moves first (General > Advisor > Elephant > Chariot > Horse; there are no ties). These five pieces only decide who moves first; they are not on the board.

Colors are decided on the first move. At the start, neither player has a color. The player who moves first can only flip on the first move (every piece is face down), and whatever color is revealed becomes that player's color; the other player takes the other color.

After that, the players alternate turns. On each turn you must do exactly one of the following three things; you cannot pass:

1. Flip: Turn over any face-down piece on the board. It may turn out to be yours or your opponent's; either way, your turn ends.
2. Move: Move one of your face-up pieces one square up, down, left or right onto an empty square. No diagonal moves, and no moving two squares at once. Every piece (including the Cannon) moves this way.
3. Capture: Use one of your face-up pieces to capture one of your opponent's face-up pieces and take its square (see the next section).

Also:

• You can only move or capture with face-up pieces of your own color; anyone may flip any face-down piece.
• Face-down pieces cannot be captured or moved.
• You cannot capture your own pieces.

Capturing

Regular pieces (all except the Cannon)

Moving onto an orthogonally adjacent square occupied by an opponent's face-up piece is a capture. Whether you can capture depends on rank:

General > Advisor > Elephant > Chariot > Horse > Cannon > Soldier

• A higher-ranked piece can capture a lower-ranked one.
• Pieces of equal rank can capture each other (whoever moves first captures).
• A lower-ranked piece cannot capture a higher-ranked one.

Two exceptions:

• The Soldier can capture the General.
• The General cannot capture the Soldier.

Cannon

The Cannon ignores rank when capturing, but captures in a special way:

• It must capture along a straight line (horizontal or vertical) by jumping over exactly one piece. The piece jumped over is called the screen (炮架). The screen can be face up or face down and can belong to either side.
• The target is the first piece on the same line beyond the screen, and it must be an opponent's face-up piece. If that piece is face down or your own, there is nothing to capture in that direction.
• Any number of empty squares may lie between the Cannon and the screen, and between the screen and the target.
• When these conditions are met, the Cannon can capture any opponent piece, including the General.
• The Cannon cannot capture an adjacent piece (there is no screen in between).

Capture Chart

(The piece names in the chart apply to both colors: each refers to the opponent's piece of that rank.)

From the chart: the Cannon can be captured by any piece except the Soldier; the Soldier cannot capture the Cannon.

Winning, Losing and Draws

A game can only end in one of the following ways. They are checked in order after every move:

1. All pieces eliminated (decisive): A player with no pieces left on the board (face up or face down) loses.
2. No legal move (decisive): The player to move has no legal move at all (no face-down piece left to flip, and none of their face-up pieces can move or capture) and loses (including when every available move is a forbidden chase).
3. 60 moves without progress (draw): If 60 consecutive moves (counting both players, i.e. 30 each) pass without either player capturing or flipping, the game is a draw.
   • There are only two kinds of "progress": capturing and flipping. Any capture or flip by either player resets the count to zero. A plain move does not count as progress and adds one to the count.
   • If the 60th move also satisfies condition 1 or 2, the decisive result takes precedence.
4. Agreed draw: One player offers a draw and the other accepts; the game is a draw. If the offer is declined (or ignored and play simply continues), the game goes on. When a draw may be offered, and by whom, is up to the platform; it does not change items 1–3.
5. Resign: Either player may resign; the player who resigns loses.

The following are not draw conditions:

• Repetition is not a draw. No matter how many times the same position occurs, the game does not end because of it; as long as no one captures or flips, the 60-move no-progress rule will eventually declare a draw.
• There is no "insufficient material" draw. Whatever pieces remain, play continues until one of the conditions above is met.
• Perpetual chase itself is not a loss. Perpetual chase is handled by "forbidden moves" (see the next section), with one exception: if every move available to the player whose turn it is is a forbidden perpetual-chase move, that player has no legal move and loses.

Forbidden Moves

Perpetual Chase

What "chase" means: you move a piece (not a capture, not a flip), and after that move, the piece you just moved could legally capture one of your opponent's face-up pieces on your next turn. As long as the capture threat is real, it is a chase, whether or not the target is protected by another piece and whether or not the capture would be a good trade.

Rule: the same piece may not chase the same opponent piece more than 5 times in a row. After 5 chases, the move that would make the 6th chase is forbidden: it may not be played, and the player must play something else instead (this is called changing moves, 變著). It is not an after-the-fact penalty: a forbidden move simply does not count as an available move, and a player loses only if every move available to them is a forbidden chase (no legal move).

How "in a row" is counted:

• It is counted on the chasing player's own turns: each time it is your turn and you move the same piece one step and are still chasing the same piece afterward, the count goes up by one. How your opponent responds in between (running away, ignoring it, moving another piece) does not affect the count.
• Only the number of times matters. There is no requirement to "circle back to the same squares", and no range limit; chasing a piece all the way across the board still counts.
• A capture threat a Cannon creates through a screen also counts as a chase, under the same rule.
• If one move chases several pieces, each is counted separately.
• There is no rank exemption: a Soldier chasing a General counts too. Conversely, a lower piece following a higher piece it cannot capture is not a chase, because there is no capture threat.

The count resets to zero when:

• On your turn you move a different piece, or move the same piece to a square where it no longer chases that piece.
• Either player captures or flips (both players' counts reset at once).

After changing moves, the count starts over; if you later chase the same piece again, it is counted from 1.

Moves that are never forbidden: capturing and flipping. You may always capture the piece you are chasing.

Example

Red's Chariot chases Black's Horse, with no captures or flips by either side in between:

On move 6 Red must change moves: move another piece, flip, capture anything that can be captured, or move the Chariot to a square where it does not chase Black's Horse. After changing moves, Red's Chariot may start chasing Black's Horse again, with the count starting from 1.

Special Rules and Rulings

• You must move: On your turn you must flip, move or capture; you cannot skip.
• When every move is forbidden: If all of the moving player's available moves are forbidden perpetual-chase moves, that player is treated as having no legal move and loses. This is extremely rare; it usually means the chasing side has left itself nothing but more chasing.
• How the chased piece is identified: The chased piece is identified by its position, followed as it flees; two pieces of the same type and color chased in turn are counted separately.
• No move limit: Games have no move limit; 60 moves in a row without a capture or flip is a draw, so a game cannot go on forever.
• Flips are unpredictable: Neither player knows what a face-down piece is until it is flipped; all either side can go on is "which pieces have not appeared yet".
• No takebacks: Once a move is made it cannot be taken back, and you cannot return to an earlier position to replay it.

Scoring

Usually only wins, losses and draws are recorded. There is also a common scoring method (used by the Douque platform). When a game is decided:

• The winner gets "base stake × multiplier" and the loser loses the same; the multiplier depends on how many pieces the loser captured: 0–5 ×5, 6–12 ×3, 13–16 ×1.
• Draws score nothing (captures are still recorded); resigning counts as a normal loss, with the multiplier based on captures up to the resignation.

Rules source: Banqi rules, version 4 (finalized 2026-10-09).