A short history of Junqi

Junqi (军棋, "army chess"), also written Luzhanqi (陆战棋, "land battle chess"), is one of the most widely played board games in China, and one of the least known outside it. This article traces its origins, the variants that grew out of it, and the choices Hidden Front makes among them.

Origins

Most accounts place the birth of Luzhanqi in the early twentieth century, in the same family as the French game L'Attaque, published in 1908, in which two armies of ranked, hidden pieces fight for a flag. L'Attaque's design spread in several directions: in the Netherlands it became Stratego in the 1940s, later published worldwide by Milton Bradley, and in China it took on the local board tradition of playing on the intersections of lines rather than inside squares, and added terrain.

The Chinese game kept the hidden ranks, the bombs, the mine-clearing engineers and the flag, and added three things that Stratego does not have: railways that let pieces travel far in a single move, camps where pieces cannot be attacked, and headquarters that freeze whatever enters them. Those three features change the game's rhythm completely. A Stratego army inches forward; a Junqi army can strike the far side of the board in one turn and must defend its flanks accordingly.

Luzhanqi became a household game in China through the middle of the twentieth century. It is cheap to make, since the pieces are small wooden or plastic tiles printed with a rank, and easy to teach, since the ranks are simply an army's chain of command. Three generations of Chinese players have learned it at school desks and kitchen tables.

Ways to play

Because the pieces are tiles that can lie face up or face down, Luzhanqi is played in several modes with the same set.

• Open chess (明棋) has all pieces face up. It removes the hidden information and is mostly used for teaching.
• Flip chess (翻棋) starts with every tile face down and shuffled. A player's move is either to flip a tile, revealing it, or to move a revealed piece. Which pieces belong to whom is decided by the first flip. It is a lighter, luck-driven game, popular with children.
• Dark chess (暗棋) is the serious form. Each player sets up their own pieces, hidden from the opponent, and a third person acts as referee. When two pieces meet, the referee compares them and removes the loser, or both, without saying what they were. Players learn only what they can infer from the outcome. This is the game that Hidden Front plays, with the screen as the referee.

Four-player Junqi

In the 1990s a four-player version, Siguo Junqi (四国军棋, "four-country army chess"), became the dominant form online in China. Four armies sit on the four sides of a cross-shaped board, allied in pairs across the table, and the game ends when both flags of one alliance fall. It is played on most Chinese game portals and has a large competitive scene. The two-player game is the one that travels better: it is quicker, it needs no partner, and its board fits a phone screen.

Rule variations

Luzhanqi has never had a single governing body, so rules differ by region, by manufacturer and by website. The main points of variation, and what Hidden Front does, are:

Rule	Variations seen	Hidden Front
Pieces that enter a headquarters	Frozen, or free to move	Frozen
Number of landmines	2 or 3	3
Bomb in the front row	Allowed or not	Not allowed
Attacking into a camp	Never allowed	Never allowed
Equal ranks	Both removed	Both removed
Engineer versus landmine	Engineer survives	Engineer survives
Winning by immobilisation	Common	Yes
Flag reveal	Sometimes revealed when the last mine falls	Never revealed
Draws	Rare in casual play	100 quiet moves, or by agreement

Hidden Front follows what we judged to be the most common competitive conventions, and adds the draw and clock rules that any online game with strangers needs. The full rules list every detail.

Junqi and Stratego side by side

Players coming from Stratego will find the ranks familiar and the terrain new.

	Stratego	Junqi
Board	10 by 10 squares	5 by 12 intersections, plus three stations
Pieces per side	40	25
Fast movement	Scout only	Any piece on a railway
Safe squares	None	Five camps per side
Frozen squares	None	Two headquarters per side
Mine clearer	Miner	Engineer, which also turns railway corners
Highest rank	Marshal	Field Marshal

The deductive core is the same in both games. If you can read a Stratego opponent, the lessons carry over, though the railways will punish you until you learn to guard your edges.

Names

The game appears under many names in English: Junqi, Luzhanqi, army chess, Chinese army chess, Chinese Stratego, land battle chess. Hidden Front uses "Junqi" for the game and gives the pieces English army ranks, with the Chinese piece names available in the game's Chinese interface.