盖棋 (Covered Chess)

How to play

Core Rules

1. During each player's turn, they can only do either one of two things: To reveal/flip over a covered chess piece, or to take an action with a revealed chess piece belonging to their colour.

2. The player revealing the first covered piece on the board in Turn 1 shall assume the colour of the revealed piece. The other player shall assume the other colour, and thus the player factions/colours are determined as such.

3. A player can move and capture either a covered piece or a revealed enemy piece.

4. A piece, when covered, acts the same as if it were a revealed piece, except that it doesn't belong to either player until it is revealed.

5. A covered piece shall be revealed when one of the following occurs:

   • A player decides to reveal a covered piece as their turn's choice.

   • A player captures a covered piece with their own piece and reveal and remove the captured piece from the board to their own pool of captured pieces.

6. When a player's General is captured, that player loses the game.

7. All pieces move the same as in standard xiangqi, observing the same directions, range of movement and movement restraints, with the exception of the following pieces:

   • Soldiers (兵卒) can move in all 4 directions because there's no sense of direction on this board.

   • Advisor (士仕) is not restrained to the X-shaped movement range; they can move freely across the entire board, 1 square diagonally at a time.

   • General (将帅) is also not restrained to the standard square area; they can move freely across the entire board 1 square at time, and they gain the ability to move diagonally, making it identical to the King in Western Chess.

8. If a player chases another player's General with 3 checks in a row with the same piece, the pursuing player cannot attack with the same piece in their next turn. They may proceed to uncover a covered piece or move any piece except to check the fleeing General with the same pursuing piece. However, a player can check the enemy General endlessly as long as it's not the same piece making the check every turn.

General Gist of the Game

1. This xiangqi variant simulates a chaotic battle, where the pieces are all scrambled randomly and they have no sight of their General or any of their troops.

2. The starting location of the pieces would determine their range of movement. This is significant for pieces like the Advisor, the Elephant (象相), and the Horse (马傌) as their starting location will pre-determine the squares that they can potentially move to and attack. The Elephant will be most impacted by this as its range of movement is severely restricted by the smaller playing field (9x10 points in xiangqi vs 8x4 tiles in gaiqi).

3. A player may end up losing the game by their own hands if they captured their own General while their General is covered. The term "capture" does not mean "save" in this sense. In other words, this is a game of "attack first, ask later". Therefore, until both Generals are revealed, any capturing of covered pieces carries a risk of "self-defeat".

4. Therefore, a player broadly needs to consider two decisions every turn: to either gain more pieces by revealing covered pieces, or to remove pieces from the board. Either action carries the equal risk of revealing or capturing a piece of their own or of the opponent's, but loosely follows the probabilities of playing card games where the risk of revealing or capturing a piece of a particular faction increases or decreases according to how many of a faction's pieces have already been revealed or removed from the board.

Origins

I concocted this game when I was of primary school age, some time in the early 90's. Xiangqi is usually kept inside a square box where all the 32 chess pieces can fit into snugly. The chess board will have to be folded into a square so that it can fit into the box on top of the stacked pieces. I play many other games as well during that period, such as Master of Magic, Dune II, and Command & Conquer, among other strategy and non-strategy games. One day, I began to use the xiangqi board as a "map" for my "battle operations". One thing led to another, and one day I found myself folding the chess board to just half its size, along the "river". I tried putting all the pieces onto the squares and realised that all the pieces can actually fit into every tile (mathematical computation wasn't my second nature at that time, so I didn't think of counting the pieces and multiplying the rows and columns of tiles). The notion of "fog of war" was fresh in mind as that's how most strategy games were designed at that time, and I also had a set of mahjong tiles and I had observed how mahjong was played through televsion programmes. I then decided to just flip all the xiangqi tiles over, covering them, scrambling them, and then lay them down on each tile of the halved chess board randomly.

Thus, this version of gaiqi was born.

I didn't share this game much with people as I thought this is probably not a unique thing. I've only ever played this game with a handful of people in my entire life. I happened to recall this now because I saw the old magnetic xiangqi set I used to have and decided to have a spontaneous game with my wife, and I then decided to document this so that I can have a reference to it in the future.

Similarity to other forms of gaiqi

Another form of gaiqi that I am aware of and later taught to me was the one where there is a pecking order to the pieces, and you cannot capture covered pieces. That form of gaiqi focuses on the pecking order, and all pieces can only move 1 tile per turn like the Soldier in my version of gaiqi. Losing the general doesn't lose the game either; the game only ends when one player's pieces have all been captured, resulting in defeat for that player with no pieces left.