Your move
Your move
Korean chess. At a glance it looks like Chinese chess, and it plays nothing like it. There is no river, so elephants and foot soldiers roam the whole board. The cannon needs a piece to leap over even when it is only moving, and it can never leap over or capture another cannon. The diagonals drawn inside each palace are real roads that chariots and cannons ride straight through. And passing your turn is a perfectly legal move.
You play the green side at the bottom, and green moves first. Tap one of your pieces and every point it can legally reach is marked with a dot; tap a dot to move there, or tap elsewhere to deselect. The Pass button plays a null move, which is legal in Janggi unless you are in check.
The chariot slides any distance along the lines, and inside a palace it may also travel along the drawn diagonals, including straight through the centre point. The horse steps one point straight then one diagonally and is blocked if the point it steps through is occupied. The elephant is the long one: one point straight then two diagonally, and both intermediate points must be empty. There is no river, so elephants and foot soldiers move over the whole board.
The cannon is the piece that decides most games. It always needs exactly one piece to leap over, whether it is moving to an empty point or capturing, and it may never leap over a cannon or capture one. Inside a palace it can also use the diagonals, with the centre point as its screen. The king and its two guards stay in the three-by-three palace, moving one point along any drawn line, diagonals included. Foot soldiers move one point forward or sideways, never backwards, and pick up the palace diagonals once they are inside the enemy palace.
You win by checkmating the enemy king. Because passing is legal there is no stalemate: having no move at all means every move, passing included, would leave your own king capturable.
Count the cannons before you count anything else. A cannon with nothing to jump over is a piece of wood, and unlike in Chinese chess it cannot even reposition itself without a screen, so a cannon can be genuinely stranded. The flip side is that your own pieces are its fuel: leaving a soldier or a guard in the right place is what turns a dead cannon into the strongest attacker on the board.
Because cannons cannot jump over or capture cannons, a cannon sitting on the palace centre point is a famous defensive resource. No enemy cannon can shoot through it, and an enemy chariot cannot ride the palace diagonals through an occupied centre either. Many players put a guard there instead and lose to a diagonal chariot check they never saw coming.
The palace diagonals turn the last three ranks into a different game. A chariot that reaches a palace corner attacks the opposite corner through the centre, and a cannon with a screen at the centre does the same. When you defend, think of your palace as five points joined by eight roads, not as nine squares.
Passing is a real weapon and the reason Janggi endgames feel unlike anything else. If your position is fine and every move makes it worse, pass and let your opponent be the one who has to commit. It is also the safe answer when you have a standing threat: pass, keep the threat, and make the opponent break their own shape first.