Asian symbol pieces can make entering Chinise Chess (Xiangqi) unnecessarily difficult for non-asian people. To ease things up a bit using "western" pieces can help, especially as most pieces have (close) equivalents in regular chess. In contrast to a hardware game , in software changing pieces can be an easy thing. The small script I made downloads piece graphics from chessvariants.org and makes them usable for hoxchess, a Free Software Xiangqi program. Here's a picture of what that can look like:

Once you want to start playing with the original pieces the following set might be an option. The script also grabs that; it's taken from the game at pragmaticlogic.com.

I'm still at learning the rules btw in case the post suggested something else before. Download

• download_more_pieces.sh