Ô Ăn Quan

Ô Ăn Quan is played on a board with 10 small pits and 2 large quan pits (one on each end). Each small pit starts with 5 seeds. Player 1 controls the bottom row; Player 2 the top. (Traditionally each arc also starts with one large quan stone worth ten dân; this digital version plays the popular simplified variant where the arcs begin empty.)

1. Click any of your pits (bottom row if you are Player 1, top row if Player 2) to pick up all seeds from that pit.
2. Seeds are distributed one by one counterclockwise into every subsequent pit - including your opponent's pits and both quan pits. This is normal: in all mancala games, seeds travel the full circuit regardless of which player owns each pit.
3. Continue sowing: if the last seed lands in a non-empty pit, pick up all seeds there and keep going.
4. Capture: if the last seed lands in an empty pit and the very next pit (CCW) has seeds, capture those seeds into your quan.
5. If that next pit is also empty, your turn simply ends with no capture.
6. The game ends when all 10 small pits on one side are empty. Each player then claims the seeds left on their own side. Most seeds in quan wins.

Ô Ăn Quan belongs to the worldwide mancala family of sowing games, and its name comes straight from the board: the two big end arcs are the quan (the mandarins) and the ten small squares hold the dân (the common people). Children scratch the board into a brick courtyard or schoolyard with chalk, a stick, or a shard of brick, drop five river pebbles into each small square, and traditionally set one larger "quan" stone in each arc. In the count, one mandarin is worth ten peasants - so capturing a quan can swing the whole game.

The game is woven into Vietnamese visual culture through Nguyễn Phan Chánh's 1931 silk painting Chơi ô ăn quan ("Playing Ô Ăn Quan"), which shows four village girls crouched around a board drawn on the ground. Exhibited at the 1931 Paris Exposition Coloniale, it became a founding icon of modern Vietnamese silk painting; one version hangs in the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum. Players still mark the end of a game with the old chant "hết quan, tàn dân, thu quân, bán ruộng" - "the mandarins are gone, the people scatter, gather the troops, sell the fields."

Tradition credits Mạc Hiển Tích - said to be the top laureate of the 1086 examinations - with writing on the arithmetic hidden in the game, a story passed down as legend rather than documented fact. Today Ô Ăn Quan is kept alive at the Vietnam Museum of Ethnology and in school folk-game revival programs, where new generations rediscover it as both a playground pastime and a gentle lesson in counting and strategy.