A different board and setup
Chess is played inside the 64 squares of an 8×8 board, while janggi pieces sit on the intersections of 9 vertical and 10 horizontal lines. Each side of the janggi board has a palace marked with diagonal lines, and that palace shapes the whole game. Unlike Chinese chess (xiangqi), janggi has no river across the middle, so elephants and soldiers aren't limited by one.
A chess king starts on the back rank, but a janggi general starts in the middle of its palace, one line up. And while the chess setup is always identical, in janggi each player chooses where their horses and elephants stand before the game, so strategy begins before the first move.
Where the king can go: palace vs castling
A chess king can walk anywhere on the board and becomes an active fighting piece in the endgame. The janggi general can never leave the nine points of its palace, and its two guards are confined there too.
Chess has castling to move the king to safety; janggi has no castling at all. The general already starts inside a fortress with its guards, so there's no need to relocate it. Instead of chess's 'castle early' rule, the key janggi principle is 'don't strip the defenders around your palace'.
Piece by piece: similar looks, different powers
Some pieces share a name or shape with chess pieces, but their abilities differ in important ways. This is where chess players make the most mistakes when switching.
- Chariot vs rook: both slide along ranks and files, but the chariot can also use the palace diagonals. With no queen in janggi, the chariot is the strongest piece.
- Horse vs knight: both move in a similar L-like pattern, but a chess knight jumps over pieces, while a janggi horse is blocked if the first point of its path is occupied.
- Elephant vs bishop: they start in similar spots, but they're unrelated. The elephant moves one step straight and two steps diagonally, can be blocked along the way and isn't locked to one color like a bishop.
- Cannon: has no chess equivalent. It must jump exactly one piece to move or capture, and cannons can't jump over or capture each other.
- Guard: a bodyguard for the general that stays in the palace. Chess has nothing like it.
- Soldier vs pawn: chess pawns move forward and capture diagonally, while janggi soldiers move and capture one step forward or sideways. There's no double first step and no en passant.
Promotion, draws and passing
A chess pawn that reaches the last rank promotes, usually to a queen. A janggi soldier that reaches the far edge doesn't promote; it simply keeps moving sideways. As a result, janggi soldiers mainly open and block lines rather than racing to become a new piece.
In chess, a player who is not in check but has no legal move is stalemated, and the game is an immediate draw. Janggi instead has the idea of passing a turn in that situation. On Playfulo the pass happens automatically, and two passes in a row are a draw. Both games treat a threefold repetition of the same position as a draw.
Janggi also has a draw rule chess doesn't: bikjang, when the two generals face each other on the same file with nothing in between. If it isn't resolved, the game is drawn. In chess the kings simply can't stand next to each other; facing each other from a distance means nothing special.
Recalibrating piece values
Chess players commonly count a pawn as 1, a knight or bishop as 3, a rook as 5 and a queen as 9. In janggi, a widely used traditional scale gives the chariot 13 points, cannon 7, horse 5, elephant 3, guard 3 and soldier 2. When games are decided on points, Han, the second player, traditionally receives 1.5 extra points as compensation.
Those numbers show how dominant the chariot is: trading it for a cannon or horse is usually a bad deal. Cannons are strongest in the opening and middlegame, when there are plenty of screens, and they tend to weaken in the endgame as pieces disappear. That's the opposite of the chess rook, which usually gets stronger as the board empties.
Tips for chess players learning janggi
Chess players new to janggi often try to jump horses like knights or send elephants long distances like bishops. Retrain those habits step by step.
- Step 1: before moving a horse or elephant, check that the first point of its path is empty.
- Step 2: whenever you look at a cannon, ask whether there's a screen to jump and whether that screen is a cannon.
- Step 3: forget the active chess king in the endgame; the general stays in the palace and defends with its guards.
- Step 4: with no promotion, use soldiers to open lines for horses and chariots rather than pushing them all the way.
- Step 5: worry less about stalemate and more about bikjang, keeping the file between the generals under control.
Common mistakes when janggi players learn chess
Janggi players moving to chess have their own typical mistakes. The biggest is treating the king purely as a piece to hide. In chess endgames, the king needs to march to the center and support its pawns; a king left on the back rank can lose an otherwise equal ending.
Other common slips are forgetting to castle and leaving the king in the center, or underestimating promotion and ignoring an opponent's passed pawn. It also takes time to get used to knights jumping freely over pieces and bishops being tied to one color.
Play both games on Playfulo
The differences are easiest to feel when you alternate between the two games. On Playfulo you can play both janggi and chess against an AI in your browser without signing up, with easy, normal and hard difficulty for each. Janggi follows the Korea Janggi Association movement rules and chess follows FIDE basics, so every rule difference in this article works exactly as described.
With a friend, create a room, share the invite link and alternate one game of janggi with one game of chess. Teaching each other the game you know best is one of the fastest ways to build a feel for both.