Janggi

Janggi

Janggi starting position
Genre(s)	Board game Abstract strategy game
Players	2
Setup time	< 1 minute
Playing time	From 20 minutes to several hours
Random chance	None
Skill(s) required	Strategy, tactics
Synonym(s)	Changgi Janki Korean chess

Janggi (including romanizations changgi and jangki), sometimes called Korean chess, is a strategy board game popular in Korea. The game derived from xiangqi (Chinese chess) and is very similar to it, including the starting position of the pieces, and the 9×10 gameboard, but without the xiangqi "river" dividing the board horizontally in the middle.

Janggi is played on a board nine lines wide by ten lines long. The game is sometimes fast-paced due to the jumping cannons and the long-range elephants, but professional games most often last over 150 moves and so are typically slower than those of Western chess.

In 2009, the first world janggi tournament was held in Harbin, People's Republic of China.

The board is composed of 90 intersections of 9 vertical files and 10 horizontal rows. The board has nearly the same layout as that used in xiangqi, except the janggi board has no "river" in the central row. The pieces consist of disks marked with identifying characters and are placed on the line intersections (as in xiangqi and Go). Janggi pieces are traditionally octagonal in shape, and differ in size according to their rank. The sides are Blue (or sometimes Green), which moves first, versus Red. Each side has a palace that is 3 lines by 3 lines (i.e. 9 positions) in the center of their side of the board against the back edge. The palace contains four diagonal lines extending outwards from the center, forming an "X" shape.

The pieces are labeled with hanja (Chinese characters). The labels on the blue pieces are all written in the semi-cursive script. For instance, the blue chariot or cha has a cursive version of 車, which looks something like 车 (the Simplified Chinese equivalent of the traditional character).