Dragon River:
3D Xiangqi
A Chinese chess board rebuilt as a miniature battlefield. Start a match below—no install, no video stand-in.
Play now live build · english / 简体中文 / 繁體中文
Fullscreen recommended. Switch among all three languages inside the game.
From chess
to Xiangqi.
The spark came from Alex Nguyen's chess project. It made a board game feel less like moving symbols and more like directing a tiny army.
I wanted to carry that feeling into Xiangqi: the river as real water, the palace drawn into the ground, soldiers with shields, cavalry on horseback, and cannons that read as artillery—not people wearing cannon badges.
Not one prompt.
A gauntlet.
I used the Gauntlet Loop introduced by Matt Shumer: split the goal into focused passes, build, attack the result with a fresh critic, repair, and test again.
The models used were GPT-5.6 Sol and Kimi K3. The useful unit was never a single generation; it was the repeated loop that caught broken cannon movement, unreadable unit badges, missing combat motion, camera/board confusion, and visual clipping.
Rules you can trust.
A world you can read.
The shipped build combines complete Xiangqi rules with articulated attack and hit reactions, human-shaped military pieces, real cannon and cavalry silhouettes, animated side flags, a camera that orbits without rotating the board, and a tuned river and atmosphere shader.
- Playable Xiangqi rules and AI opponent
- English, Simplified Chinese, and Traditional Chinese
- Animated attacks, impacts, flags, water, particles, and camera
- Desktop and mobile controls with fullscreen play