Viet Folk Games – Play on LAN

Seven games: o an quan, caro, co ganh, ca ngua, tam cuc, tien len and co tuong. Share a WiFi, scan the QR code, play. No Internet and no account needed.

A brick yard, twelve squares drawn with a piece of chalk, two handfuls of pebbles picked up in the garden — that used to be a whole afternoon. Lang Game Viet puts those games on your phone but keeps the part that matters: someone has to sit down with you.

SEVEN GAMES

• O an quan — A Vietnamese mancala. Scoop up one of your pits and sow the pebbles one by one; land past an empty pit and you capture what lies beyond, then keep capturing down the line. The game ends when both big pits are taken. Switch on hand sowing and each tap drops one pebble, as on a real yard.

• Co caro — Gomoku on a 15×15 board. Five in a row wins. Optional house rule: a row of exactly five blocked at both ends does not count.

• Co ganh — Move a piece between two enemy pieces and both switch to your color. Seal a group in with no free point left beside it and the whole group turns as well.

• Ca ngua — The Vietnamese cross-shaped race game. Roll a 1 or a 6 to leave the stable and to earn another roll. Land on a rival horse and it goes home. Get all four horses up your ladder to win. Two to four players.

• Tam cuc — A folk card game with 32 pieces, ranked general, mandarin, elephant, chariot, cannon, horse, soldier; same rank, red beats black. Do not want to show your hand? Duck out and lose the trick instead. Two to four players.

• Tien len — The Vietnamese shedding game on a standard 52-card deck. Thirteen cards each; whoever holds the three of spades opens. Beat the table with the same shape and count, only higher; runs and double runs are in, and four of a kind or three straight pairs cut a two. A lucky deal wins on the spot. Two to four players.

• Co tuong — Xiangqi, the chess played all over Vietnam. A 9x10 board with the pieces on the intersections. The general never leaves his palace, the elephant never crosses the river, and the cannon needs a piece to jump over to capture. Checkmate wins, and so does leaving your opponent with no legal move; perpetual check and perpetual chasing lose the game, as in tournament play. The pieces carry the traditional Chinese characters, with Vietnamese names underneath on a wide screen.

THREE WAYS TO PLAY

On your own against the computer — easy, normal or hard. No one around, still a game.

Host a room for your friends — your screen shows a QR code, they scan it and sit down.

Join your friend's room — pick it from the rooms found nearby, scan the QR code, or type the address by hand if your network blocks discovery.

Drop off the network mid-game and you come back to the same seat with the board untouched. After a game, tap play again and the running score carries over. The rules of every game are written out inside the room.

WHY NO INTERNET IS NEEDED

There is no cloud server in this app. One device hosts the room and the others connect straight to it over your local WiFi. The game never leaves your home network. So it works on a train, in a cafe with no signal, or at home when nobody has mobile data left. No WiFi at all? One phone turns on its hotspot, the other joins, done.

The trade-off: everyone has to be nearby, on the same network. This is an app for playing with the person sitting next to you, not for matching with strangers.

PRIVACY

No accounts, no sign-in, no ads, no in-app purchases.

No personal data collected, no trackers, no analytics.

Your device remembers four things: the nickname you chose, whether sound is on, your sowing mode in o an quan, and a random code it makes up for itself so you can take your seat back after a dropped connection. All four stay on your device and never leave your local network.

The app asks for local network access to find rooms nearby, and for the camera only when you tap to scan a QR code. Nothing else.

Tam cuc and tien len here are card games played for fun: no betting, no virtual currency, no buying points. Tien len drops the two penalty rules that only make sense when money is on the table.