by Michael Orion

Written by [user=WhoaWorthy]Michael Orion[/user] | Edited by [user=Kendination]Ken Trần[/user]

When I moved to Ho Chi Minh City in 2023, I was immediately struck by the local game scene. This is a country of over 100 million people, a young, tech-savvy population that has already made Vietnam one of the largest markets in the world for mobile games, but its tabletop story was just getting started.

It’s an exciting, complex community to be a part of. I’ve since learned how other Asian markets like Korea, Thailand, and Taiwan grew from similar beginnings — with deep legacies but little analog gaming — into the robust tabletop hubs they are today.

Vietnam is on that same path and more recently leaning into the integration of games and culture. We have a unique opportunity to help nurture this growth, to see games recognized as a powerful medium for storytelling, cultural preservation, and art.

The Foundations: From Cờ Tướng to Catan

To understand Vietnam’s new hobby, you have to look at its old ones. For generations, “analog games” meant the clack of Cờ Tướng (Chinese Chess) pieces in a park, the quick snap of cards in a game of Tiến Lên (a popular climbing game) with friends, or the traditional gambling games played during the Tết holiday.

The leap to modern hobby board games had to be built from the ground up. That work fell to a few pioneers in the early 2000s, one of whom I had the pleasure of speaking with at SPIEL Essen 25: Steve Lam. Steve was one of the earlier and more passionate advocates for bringing board games to Vietnam, helping to establish one of the first game clubs, Cashflow, in 2005. He followed that by opening the Rich House café, which ran from 2007-2011.

His strategy was simple but effective: import the games and build a community around them. He organized events and tournaments for titles that are now global staples: UNO, Werewolf, CATAN, Ticket to Ride, and Power Grid.

It worked. Fast forward to today, and those simple, social games are still the most recognized gateway games. UNO, Werewolf, and Exploding Kittens are the undisputed champions of the market here, an easy entry point for the new generation of gamers.

The Current Scene: Cafés, Clones, and Culture

Today’s board game scene in Vietnam is a vibrant, chaotic, and rapidly evolving space defined by some key factors:

The Indispensable Café Culture

First, you cannot talk about gaming in Vietnam without talking about the cafés. In major cities, they are the lifeblood of the hobby. Places like Merry Meeple, Board Game Station, Arata, Era, & Sip-n-Play in Ho Chi Minh City or The Root & The Keep in Hanoi are not just places to grab a coffee; they are community libraries.

Because many imported, “hobby-weight” foreign games are priced out of reach for the average young person, these cafés become the primary option to play them. They are where new games are discovered, where rules are taught, and where the next generation of gamers is being nurtured.

The Price and Counterfeit Challenge

This leads to the market’s biggest challenge: price and proximity. Vietnam’s closeness to China means the market is flooded with counterfeit products.

As [user=PlayPlus]Đạt Lê[/user], founder of the publisher Playplus.vn, told me, this is a double-edged sword. While counterfeits hurt legitimate publishers, they also act as a “demo” for complex mechanisms, introducing players to games like Root, Here to Slay, or Secret Hitler that they would never have otherwise encountered.

The Rise of the Local Publishers

This complex environment has forged a new generation of passionate local publishers, each taking a different approach to building the market.

Localization-First Publishers: There are two primary localizers here in Vietnam: One in Hanoi called Everjoy, which operates under the well-known Board Game VN brand. They are the official localizer for many international hits, including Exploding Kittens and Splendor. They also publish a catalog of locally designed games, often leveraging popular Vietnamese IPs like the “Lớp Học Mật Ngữ” comics or the “Thỏ Bảy Màu” cartoon rabbit.

The second, based in HCMC, is PlayPlus.vn which has been localizing many lighter party style games such as Taco Cat Goat Cheese Pizza and Coyote into Vietnam exclusive editions. Both are now expanding into making new designs in the near future.

The Culture-First Champions: Other publishers are focused on bringing Vietnamese culture to the world. Ngũ Hành Games has pursued this “culture-first” strategy for years. Their game, Hội Phố, is a prime example — a strategic game about 17th-century merchants competing for contracts in the ancient port city of Hội An. Their efforts have paid off, with successes like Dream Diary and Hội Phố getting international distribution.

The Creative Pivots: Then there are pioneers like Nguyên from Meeple In Saigon. After running a game shop for years, he’s pivoted to designing bespoke games for brands — a new and growing trend. He has created games for a local toy company, one to market a movie launch, and another for a Vietnamese web browser.

As he told me:

High-end Game Producers:Beyond cafés and publishers, a smaller niche of Vietnamese creators treats board games as art. This luxury segment is led by Runam and Maztermind, whose designs merge craftsmanship, culture, and aesthetics.

These brands reimagine classics like chess, dominoes, and poker with handcrafted wood, leather, and brass. Each piece feels like décor, bridging play and design while celebrating Vietnamese artistry.

Together, they define Vietnam’s “lifestyle gaming” movement in which board games symbolize taste and identity. Though niche, they help reframe games as cultural artifacts rather than simple pastimes.

Wave of Vietnamese-Themed Crowdfunding

That call for “locally made titles” has been answered. We’re seeing an increase in the quality and ambition of games designed and produced entirely in Vietnam. These are deeply personal, culturally rich projects. Some have existed in the market for many years already and originated on a crowdfunding platform here called Comicola:

▪️ Thần Tích: A massively successful trading card game from KEIG Studio, this strategic dueling game has players take on the roles of gods and figures from Vietnamese mythology, like Sơn Tinh (the Mountain God) and Thủy Tinh (the Water God).

Dozen War▪️ Dozen War: Another hit Comicola project, Dozen War (Thập Nhị Chiến) is a high-production, high-complexity tactical wargame. Created by Time Sun See Studio, it’s a fantasy game of warring heroes that impressively blends the strategic movement of Chess, the cardplay of a TCG, and the hero-centric combat of a MOBA.

▪️ Thần Chủ: Another strategic card game, this one with a unique theme, brings “deified” Vietnamese historical figures into a fantasy setting. Players can build decks around heroes like the legendary general Trần Hưng Đạo, the strategist Lý Thường Kiệt, or the mythical founders of Vietnam: Lạc Long Quân and Âu Cơ.

Crowdfunding continues to be a source for new games here outside of the traditional publisher model, and we’re excited to see this platform evolve.

However, behind the cafés and publishers lies something subtler: a quiet transformation in how Vietnamese people play and what they expect from games. The social roots of Vietnam’s gaming habits run deep, shaped by family gatherings, friendly rivalry, and simple mechanisms. As new genres arrive and local creators experiment, those long-standing habits are beginning to shift, sometimes gradually, sometimes with resistance.

This brings us to the cultural heartbeat of Vietnam’s gaming story: how the country’s play culture itself is evolving.

The Slow Shifting Board Game Culture

Vietnam’s board game story isn’t just about new publishers or cafés; it’s also about a community negotiating what kind of play it wants to build.

For decades, traditional games like Cờ Cá Ngựa (horse chess), Phỏm (Vietnamese rummy), and Cờ Tỷ Phú (Vietnamese Monopoly) defined the social texture of family gatherings. These games embodied a sense of connection: quick, familiar, and slightly competitive.

When modern board games entered the scene, it was natural that players gravitated toward social deduction hits like Werewolf, BANG!, Coup, and Avalon. They echoed that same energy: fast talk, bluffing, laughter, and light-hearted rivalry.

Nonetheless, that early enthusiasm also shaped a creative paradox. Many Vietnamese designers who are deeply inspired by these popular titles either ended up creating games that felt too similar or avoided the genre altogether. The major board game communities, particularly those anchored around design and publishing, often reject these derivative social games, arguing that the local industry can mature only by moving beyond them.

Yet at the same time, when designers create original works with unfamiliar mechanisms or deeper strategy, the mainstream audience tends to hesitate. The result is an ongoing tension: the niche audience that craves innovation is too small to sustain a market, while the mass audience hasn’t yet developed the appetite or the habit for experimentation.

Vietnam’s designers find themselves walking a creative tightrope, trying to bridge passion and practicality, familiarity and freshness. Still, within that struggle lies the story of a scene growing up. As players seek more meaningful forms of connection and creators push for cultural identity in design, Vietnam’s board game culture is slowly, steadily maturing through one experiment at a time.

The Future: Building a Bridge to the World

This creative explosion is the future, but for years Vietnamese designers have faced a major hurdle: a lack of “bridges” to the global market. Accessing platforms like Kickstarter is notoriously difficult, often requiring an overseas partner.

This is where the story takes an interesting turn.

Designer Ionah Nguyen teaches her game Chuồn Chuồn at SPIEL Essen 25

The “Road to Essen”

This year, the publisher Everjoy launched a massive national board game design contest called “Road to Essen”. The goal was simple: find and inspire new Vietnamese-designed games, professionally develop them, and fund their debut at the SPIEL Essen 25 fair in Germany.

The response was quite high, with 155 entries from all over the country. The judging panel even included international talent like Randy Flynn.

The winner of the first-ever Road to Essen was designer Thinh LeHuu for his game July.

July is a co-operative card game built around a fascinating theme: the Vietnamese “Hungry Ghost” festival in the seventh lunar month. Players take on the role of “gatekeepers” trying to guide stubborn, lost souls back to the underworld.

Thinh, who had previously found success on Kickstarter with Mons and Mages, believes the game industry here is at a turning point. The “Road to Essen” was a good introduction to a larger global community in October 2025. It’s the beginning of one “bridge” that Ionah Nguyen, CEO of Everjoy Global, said the community needed: “There’s no shortage of creativity in Vietnam. What we lack are bridges.”

Another bridge was recently built with the success of a game that my own Rolling Wizards Studio collaborated on with Ngũ Hành Games called Onstage, which had its soft launch at SPIEL Essen 25 and is awaiting its global English launch with Arcane Wonders and The Dice Tower in early 2026. We are all thrilled to be part of this movement, exposing a global audience to a piece of Vietnamese culture.

Designer and article author Michael Orion

This is just the start. The quality of design, the ambition of the creators, and the passion of the community are all converging. The future of board games in Vietnam is bright, and the world will see in the coming years more of what it has to offer.

Keep Up with the Scene

If you want to follow the Vietnamese board game community, here are a few local content creators I recommend:

▪️ KBoardGame

▪️ BoardGameDay

▪️ Donut Dragons Boardgames

▪️ Mr. Ken Board Games

Coming Soon Projects

Here are a few newly announced titles for 2026 you can follow on BGG:

▪️ Stem & Branch

▪️ Phố Phở

▪️ Restoration

▪️ July

▪️ Chuồn Chuồn

Full List of Game Cafes:

Google Maps list

Feel free to reach out to me, [user=WhoaWorthy]WhoaWorthy[/user], directly on BGG with any questions, or post in the comments so the community here can reply publicly.