Jungle Chess rules: how to play Dou Shou Qi

The board and the opening position

Jungle Chess — Dou Shou Qi (鬥獸棋, "the game of fighting animals") — is a two-player chase game on a board seven squares wide and nine deep. Each side commands eight animals of different strength. You win by marching any one of them into the enemy den, and almost every rule in the game exists to make that march difficult.

Three kinds of terrain sit on the board, and they do all the interesting work:

• Two rivers (小河) of six squares each, in the middle of the board. Only the rat may enter them.
• Six traps (陷阱), three around each den. An animal standing in an enemy trap loses all its rank.
• Two dens (獸穴), one behind each home row. Enter the enemy's and the game is over.

Notice the symmetry: every animal faces its own kind diagonally across the board, and the two strongest pieces — the elephant and the lion — start on opposite wings. The lion is on the same wing as the enemy rat, which is the single most important geometric fact in the opening.

The eight animals and the rank ladder

Every animal carries a rank from 8 down to 1. A piece may capture any enemy piece of equal or lower rank — with one famous exception that we will get to in a moment.

Equal ranks trade: a wolf may capture a wolf. That sounds obvious, but it shapes the whole middle game, because it means any piece you push forward can be answered by its twin, and the side that runs out of answers first loses a wing.

How the animals move

There is only one move in Jungle Chess, and every animal has it: one square up, down, left or right. No diagonals. No sliding. The lion and the tiger add a leap over the river, described below, and the rat adds the ability to swim; otherwise a rat and an elephant travel at exactly the same speed.

That single-step rule is why the game feels like a slow chase rather than a shoot-out. The board is nine squares deep; a piece needs at least eight moves to reach the far den, and your opponent has eight moves to do something about it.

Two squares are off limits:

• The river — for every animal except the rat.
• Your own den — you may never step into it, so it can never be blocked by your own piece.

Capturing: the rank rule

You capture by moving onto an enemy piece. The move is legal only if your piece outranks the target, or matches it exactly. Captured animals are removed for good — there is no promotion, no re-entry, and no way to get a piece back.

Because captures are one square at a time, every capture puts your piece on a square the enemy just left — often a square their other animals still cover. In Jungle Chess, taking a piece for free is rare; taking a piece and surviving the reply is the real skill.

The rat and the elephant

The rule everybody remembers: the rat captures the elephant, and the elephant can never capture the rat. The folk explanation is that the rat runs into the elephant's ear or trunk; the game design explanation is that it turns a strict hierarchy into a circle, so no single piece dominates the board.

Two clarifications that decide real games:

• A rat must be on land to take the elephant. A rat sitting in the river cannot reach out and capture a piece standing on the bank.
• A rat in the water can only be captured by another rat in the water. Land animals cannot touch it — which is why an attacking rat that reaches the river is so hard to remove.

The river: who swims and what it blocks

The two rivers are three squares deep and two wide, sitting either side of the centre file. They split the board into a left wing, a right wing and a narrow central corridor at file d, and control of that corridor is usually control of the game.

The three water rules worth memorising

1. Only the rat may enter a river square.
2. A rat in the water cannot be captured from land, and cannot capture from the water onto land. It may capture another rat that is also in the water.
3. A rat in the water blocks the leap of a lion or tiger passing over that river — either colour's rat, including your own.

The lion and tiger leap

The lion and the tiger may jump right over a river in a single move, landing on the first land square beyond it. The leap is vertical (three water squares) or horizontal (two water squares). The piece may capture whatever it lands on, if rank allows.

The leap is the only long move in the game, and it changes the arithmetic completely: a lion on its own back rank is eight moves from the enemy den by land, but a leap cuts three of them off. It is also the only way to threaten both wings at once.

Traps: the great equaliser

Each den is flanked by three trap squares. An enemy animal standing in one of your traps drops to rank 0. Any of your pieces, however feeble, may capture it, and while it stands there it cannot capture anything itself.

Three details that catch people out:

• The effect is immediate and local. Step out of the trap and the animal's rank returns in full.
• Your own traps do nothing to your own pieces. You may walk over them freely.
• A trap does not stop a piece walking straight through to the den — it just makes that piece vulnerable for one turn. If nothing can capture it, the trap is decoration.

How the game ends

There are three ways to win:

1. Enter the enemy den. Any animal, any rank. The game ends the moment it lands.
2. Capture every enemy animal. Rare, but it happens in long endgames.
3. Leave your opponent with no legal move. Rarer still, and usually engineered against a single trapped piece.

There is no stalemate rule that rescues the losing side, and no check: you are never warned. If your opponent can walk into your den next move, nobody will tell you.

Draws and repetition

Traditional Jungle Chess has no formal draw rule, which is a problem in endgames where both sides shuffle. Most modern implementations — including the one on this site — add two:

• Threefold repetition of the same position is a draw.
• A long run of moves with no capture is a draw (commonly 50 or 60 moves each).

Some tournament rule sets instead forbid the chaser from repeating, as Xiangqi does with perpetual check. If you play a serious match, agree which version you are using first.

Rule variants you will meet

Dou Shou Qi has never had a governing body, so printed sets and websites differ. None of these variants is "wrong" — but they change the game enough that you should settle them before a serious match.

The version on Blinky Games follows the most widely played set with the vertical-only tiger leap and modern draw rules, which is also what most Chinese-language apps use.

Your first game, in five steps

1. Set up. Lion and tiger in the back corners, cat and dog in front of the den's diagonal, elephant, wolf, leopard and rat across the third row. Black moves first.
2. Open with the rat or a mid-rank piece. Do not throw the lion forward on move one — it has nowhere safe to land.
3. Watch the enemy rat. Its only job is your elephant. Keep a piece able to answer it.
4. Trade when you are ahead. Every trade brings the stronger side closer to a clean run at the den.
5. Count moves to the den before you commit. A piece four steps from the den with nothing in the way wins the race; a piece four steps away that walks into a guarded trap loses on the spot.

Common questions