40 AI opponents, from a complete beginner to a master, each with a name, a country, a temperament and a playing style. Pick the one that matches your level, press play, and the game opens in your browser — nothing to install, no account. Every one of them runs on Pikafish, the strongest open-source xiangqi engine, deliberately held back to play like a human of that strength rather than like a machine.
How the bots are calibrated
A chess engine at full strength is unbeatable and, worse, uninteresting: it never blunders, so you never get the chance to punish anything. Our bots use the approach popularised by Lichess. Pikafish is asked for several candidate moves at once, each one is scored against a target average centipawn loss — how much worse than the best move the bot is allowed to play — and the move is drawn from that list with a bias that depends on the target tier. A discovery-tier bot happily plays the fourth-best move; a master-tier bot almost always finds the first. The temperament then reorders that list before the draw: an aggressive bot moves up the candidates closest to the engine's own best move; a defensive one marks each candidate down by the centipawns it gives up, so the moves that lose the least come first; a tactical one leaves the order untouched, which gives it the widest spread of the three. It is a lean, not a rule: at the lowest tiers, where the draw stays wide open, it barely shows; the higher the tier, the more it decides which move is played — and the less two bots of the same tier play like the same opponent. The few bots that keep a single candidate have no list to draw from: they play the move their search ranks first, and only the depth of that search sets their strength. The tiers are then checked with automated tournaments.
Which bot should you play first?
If you have just learned the rules, start with the discovery tier: those bots make real mistakes, leave pieces hanging and let you practise checkmating patterns without pressure. Once you beat one of them, the apprentice tier opens. A good rule is to play the bot you beat about half the time — winning every game teaches nothing, and losing every game is discouraging. Experienced players will usually find their level around the competitor tier; the master tier and the historical figures are there for when you want a genuine fight. Your progress is saved per bot, so you can come back to an unfinished game.
Do I need an account or a download?
No account, and nothing to install. The 40 bots are free and play in your browser; the only download is the engine, about 50 MB, which your browser fetches once — at your first game, or at your first mouse click in the play area of an unlocked bot — and then keeps, so later games start without downloading it again. A guest's unfinished game is saved in the browser and resumed on the next visit; an account keeps your progress across devices and unlocks online play.
Pikafish, the engine behind every opponent
Pikafish is to xiangqi what Stockfish is to chess: an open-source engine with a neural-network evaluation, stronger than any human player. On this site it runs directly in your browser: the bot thinks on your own device, not on a server, and there is nothing to install. The same engine powers the analysis board, where you can review any game you have played against a bot move by move and see where it went wrong.
