Xiangqi Master

The opponent is Fairy-Stockfish playing the xiangqi variant, and the strength slider drives its real UCI_Elo limiter from 600 to 2500. Pick 1100 and you get an opponent that plays like 1100, not like a name someone invented for a menu.

The engine runs on the device. There is no server between you and your move, so it works on a plane, on the underground and with the phone in airplane mode.

Every puzzle was checked by the engine for a unique fastest mate (a second, equally fast move would make the answer ambiguous) and then replayed through the app's own rules engine, which has to agree that the line ends in checkmate. Positions must also be legally reachable — no elephant across the river, no soldier that changed file before crossing it.

The first wrong move costs nothing. The board shows what you played in a quiet colour and lets you carry on. Miss twice and the puzzle is a miss.

Stuck instead of wrong? The hint ladder has three rungs — the idea in words, then the piece to move, then the move itself — and each rung halves what solving is worth. A solve with hints is still a solve: the tick, the progress and the day on your streak all count. The screen tells you what the rating change will be in real numbers.

Files are counted from each player's own right, Red in Chinese numerals and Black in full-width Arabic ones; a chariot or cannon moving along a file names a number of ranks, while a horse or elephant names its destination file. Two of a kind on one file become 前 and 後.

Settings collapse the record to Chinese notation alone or to coordinates alone, whichever you read faster.

• Asian rules, not western ones — perpetual check loses, as the rules require. Plain repetition is still a draw.
• Your own rating — two of them, actually: one for games and one for puzzles, because solving a forced mate and holding a position for forty moves are not the same skill. The first ten games move it twice as far, so a badly chosen starting point corrects itself in an evening.
• Hot-seat two-player — one phone, two people, and you choose Red or Black against the engine.
• Learn — ten lessons from the board and the river through each piece's move to check and mate, every goal move verified against the rules engine.
• Hanzi or western letters — the pieces read 車馬炮 or R H C, on a switch, for as long as you need it.
• The Chronicle — a streak with three doors: the daily problem, a lesson or a game. No red counter, no warning that it is about to break, and no way to buy one back.
• One reminder a day, at an hour you pick, off until you ask for it. It is a local notification — nothing is sent anywhere.
• Sound and touch — five wood-and-bell cues plus haptics, both switchable off. Sound follows the silent switch and mixes with your music instead of interrupting it.
• History — every game stored on the device, replayable move by move, in Chinese notation.
• Written English — and Tiếng Việt and 繁體中文. The two non-English files are the author's drafts rather than translations by a xiangqi player who speaks the language, and the app says so on its own language screen.