[English Teaching Activities] Ô Ăn Quan

One of my part-time job is to teach English for Vietnamese children. I have only two students who are brothers, and right now they are 7 and 8 years old. I have been teaching them since they were 4 and 5 years old, and one of the difficulties is that I must constantly think of activities that can be played with only two of them.

I have applied and adapted quite a lot of educational games and activities which I learnt from the Internet. Besides, I also recreated some of the activities based on folk games or team building activities.

For this series [English Teaching Activities], I would like to share activities that I have been applied for my class. I hope this would be helpful for you somehow.

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Activity Name: Ô Ăn Quan (Mandarin Square Capturing)

Students: 2

Materials:

1. The board and the pieces:

You can choose either of these:

• Buying a O An Quan game box which will include the board and the pieces
• Printing out the frame on A2 paper and reinforce it by a plastic laminated sheet + selecting 50 small pebble stones (same size) and 2 big pebble stones
• Using a color tape to mark the frame

2. A powerpoint file in which student can choose numbers corresponding to certain words. Please see my sample Powerpoint for more detail
3. White board, marker

How to play:

• Let’s assume all of you know how to play O An Quan. If you don’t, there is a section at the end of this article explaining how to play O An Quan
• Every time a student makes the move and end up collect the pieces, they will have the chance to select the amount of numbers according to the pieces they get
• Instructor’s job is to write down the words on the board. Make sure that you divide the board into 2 parts for 2 students, and write the words that students choose correctly
• At the end, winner of the O An Quan game will get 1 point/star.
• After that, based on the amount of words that each student can collect, each student has to make sentences from their collected words. The more sentences they can make, the more points they get
• It depends on instructor if instructor wants the students to reuse the available words or not.

Some varieties:

• For the material, if you don’t want to make a Powerpoint file, you can write down the words on pieces of paper, and let the students pick the pieces of paper according to the amount of chess pieces they can collect each time
• You can create a board for 3 or 4 players. But maximum is 4 players, because kids don’t have patience to wait for others, and if it takes long to get their turn, kids will get bored easily and start to lose attention.

 

How to play O An Quan (Mandarin Square Capturing)

Source: Wikipedia

Ô ăn quan (literally: Mandarin Square Capturing) is a traditional Vietnamese children’s board game. This game is valuable for enhancing calculating ability.

Board, pieces, and players

A rectangle which is divided into ten squares (5×2) with two semicircles at each end is drawn on the floor or the yard. The ten squares are called “rice field square”, “fish pond square” or “citizen square” and the two semicircles are called “Mandarin squares”.

Pieces may be stones, fruit seeds or any other small things.

Two players or two teams sit in two sides of the board. Each controls one side of the board.

History

The game’s origin is still a mystery to the Vietnamese people, as it has been played for many years. Many people say Vietnamese ancestors were inspired by green rice fields to invent a game that could be played in those huge fields. At first, the game had become quite popular throughout the country. However, as time passed Vietnamese children no longer had the same passion for the game like those in the past. For this reason, the Vietnam Museum of Ethnology is exhibiting the game with fully explained instructions with the aim of keeping the game alive among children nowadays.

Rules

Setup

Each player places one big stone or ten small stones (called the “Mandarin piece”) in the Mandarin square as well as five small stones (called “citizen pieces”) in each of the rice field squares.

Object

The game ends when all the pieces are captured.

If both Mandarin pieces are captured, the remaining citizen pieces belong to the player controlling the side that these pieces are on. There is a Vietnamese saying to express this situation: “hết quan, tàn dân, thu quân, bán ruộng” (literally: “Mandarin is gone, citizen dismisses, take back the army, selling the rice field”) or “hết quan, tàn dân, thu quân, kéo về” (literally: “Mandarin is gone, citizen dismisses, take back the army, retreat”)

Whichever player has more pieces is the winner (a Mandarin piece is equal to ten or five citizen pieces).

Scattering

Players play rock paper scissors to determine the first player.

The first player takes up all the pieces of any rice field square on his/her side of the board and distributes (Vietnamese: rải: literally: scatter) one piece per square, starting at the next square in either direction. When all pieces are distributed, the player repeats by taking up the pieces of the following square and distributing them.

If his/her side of the board is empty, he/she must use five previously-won pieces to place one piece in each square on his/her side before repeating the distribution. (If he/she do not possess any pieces, he/she must borrow a piece from the other player and return it when counting the points at the end of the game.)

Capturing

When the next square to be distributed is empty, the player wins all the pieces in the square after that. A square that contains a lot of pieces is the nhà giàu square (literally: rich square).

When the next square is an empty Mandarin square, or the next two squares are empty, it becomes the other player’s turn.

In some game variations, the Mandarin square can contain little citizen pieces called quan non (literally: quan: Madarin, non: young/unripen) which may not be captured.

Song

The children song (Vietnamese: đồng dao) is used when playing this game:

Hàng trầu hàng cau – The betel stall, the areca nut stall

Là hàng con gái – Be stalls of girls

Hàng bánh hàng trái – The cake stall, the fruit stall

Là hàng bà già – Be stalls of old women

Hàng hương hàng hoa – The incense stall, the flower stall

Là hàng cúng Phật. – Be stalls for offering the Buddha.