Ban Chi (AKA Banqi)
At my last job, I made some new friends who play a game (usually over lunch) they call Ban Chi (or Banqi). It’s played with a Chinese chess set (on half the board) starting with the pieces face down. A typical game takes around 15 minutes.
They began playing Ban Chi after they got good enough at Chinese Chess (AKA Xiangqi) that games were taking multiple hours.
A couple of these people (Thom and Brian) work with me at my current job, and we still play Ban Chi.
Once in a while someone new will express interest in learning the game. This happened recently at a company lunch, so Thom printed out a chart of the pieces. We work with many clever people, and one of our co-workers (Shaun, I think) suggested that it might be useful to combine that chart with the playing board. So I did:
