Ô ăn quan

Ô ăn quan is a traditional Vietnamese children's board game belonging to the mancala family, played across Vietnam for generations. The exact origins of the game are unclear, though some believe Vietnamese ancestors drew inspiration from the arrangement and rhythm of rice fields when devising it. The game is played on a rectangular board divided into ten small squares arranged five by two, with a larger semicircular square placed at each end of the row. The ten small squares represent rice fields or citizen spaces, while the two semicircles are called Mandarin squares. Players use stones, seeds or other small objects as pieces. At the start of a game each player places one large piece, called the Mandarin, in a semicircle and five small pieces, called citizens, in each of the squares on their own side of the board. On a turn a player picks up all the pieces from one of their own squares and sows them one by one into the following squares in a chosen direction, and captures the contents of any square that becomes full immediately after an empty one during this scattering. Play continues until all the pieces on the board have been captured, and whichever player holds the greater number of pieces at the end is the winner. The game is most commonly played by two people, though variants exist for two teams or for three and four participants.