About Learn Xiangqi

Who makes this, what it does, and where to write

Why this site exists

Xiangqi is the most played board game on earth, and almost everything written about it in English assumes you already know it. The guides that exist tend to be move lists — a transcription of what strong players did, with no sentence saying why. That is a fine way to study once you can already read a position, and a poor way to meet a game for the first time.

So this site is built around the opposite order. You play from the first minute, against an opponent that can be set weak enough to lose to, and a coach names what is happening as it happens: which opening you have just played, what the position wants, and which of your moves was the mistake. The written guides — the rules, the differences from Western chess, the openings, the middlegame and the endgame — are there to be read when a game raises the question, not before it.

What runs in your browser

Nearly all of it. The rules engine, the computer opponent that searches for its moves, and the coach that narrates them are JavaScript running on your own device. That has three consequences worth stating plainly:

• Your games are yours. A game played without an account never leaves the browser it was played in. There is no server that has seen it.
• It works offline. Once a page has loaded, the board, the opponent, the coach and the puzzles keep working with no network at all.
• It is fast, and it is honest about strength. The opponent is a real search, not a table of canned replies, so a level that beats you will keep beating you until you get better.

Two things do need a server. Creating an account — which exists only so your settings and record follow you between devices — and the Analyze button in the coach panel, which sends the current position to Anthropic's Claude for a written opinion. Everything that leaves your device is listed in the Privacy Policy, and the Analyze feature has its own page in the AI Disclosure.

Who makes it

Learn Xiangqi is published by SproutVest, LLC, and is built with AI assistance — a person decides what it should do, reviews what comes back, and is answerable for what ships. The AI Disclosure says exactly how, and names who is accountable. It is not a committee, and it is not a content farm: the guides on this site were written for this site.

What it costs

Nothing, today. The game is free, the guides are free, and no feature is behind a login. The site will carry advertising, because hosting is paid for either way — and when there is eventually something to buy, the only thing buying it will do is remove the adverts. No puzzle, engine level, lesson or analysis will ever move behind a purchase. That is a commitment the Terms of Use make in writing.

How to reach us

Write to [email protected] for anything at all — a bug, a rule the engine got wrong, a guide that confused you, or a question about the site. For anything about your data specifically, including a request to delete an account, [email protected] reaches the same people and is the address the Privacy Policy names.

Reports that a position was scored wrongly, or that a move the engine allowed is not legal, are the most useful mail this site gets. Xiangqi has three rules that software regularly gets wrong — the flying general, the horse's blocked leg, and perpetual check — and this engine has had the last of them wrong twice.