How does xiangqi's age compare to go's?
These answers restate the rules implemented by our open-source engine, which follows the WXF laws for movement, checkmate and both repetition rulings: a side that forces a repetition by perpetual check or perpetual chase loses rather than drawing. The chase half has not been validated against the official casebook. Where an answer refers to a specific position, that position lives on the linked reference page, where the build verifies it before publishing.
Direct answer
Go is considerably older. It is documented in Chinese sources many centuries before xiangqi settled into its modern form during the Song dynasty. The two games are not close in age, despite both being ancient by the standards of most board games still played today.
Why the comparison is still useful
It puts xiangqi's own age in perspective. A thousand years sounds enormous next to almost any other pastime, and it is, but within the specific world of Chinese board games, xiangqi is the newer of the two major ones, not the older. See when xiangqi was invented for what actually anchors that dating.
Why they are rarely compared directly outside this kind of question
The games are structurally very different, capture versus territory, a single target versus none, so their histories are usually studied separately even though both are central to Chinese board-game culture and both are still played daily in parks across China today.
Related questions
Is go older than western chess too?
Yes, by most accounts, go's documented history predates the medieval emergence of both xiangqi and western chess.
Did xiangqi borrow anything from go?
The convention of playing on intersections rather than inside squares is shared between the two, and is generally understood as the older East Asian convention.
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