Travel Photo: Vietnamese Chess

As a traveler, there are those special moments that always catch your eye and egg you to notice it at close quarters. This was one such moment too where a couple of elderly gentlemen were playing a local game and some locals were watching them. As I am very inquisitive by nature, I was automatically tempted to go watch the game to understand what it was and how it was being played.


The location of this scene was at the banks of the Hoan Kiem lake at Hanoi in North Vietnam and under a lovely big tree. As I started watching this game, I figured out that it was very similar to chess and since I liked playing the game of chess, it piqued up my interest even more. And it looked even better as the two elderly gentlemen were playing it with a lot of thought and competition.


This game is played in a slightly different way when compared to traditional chess. As far as I understood, the players like rook, knight, queen, bishop, pawn, etc. moved like the normal game of chess, but the board in itself was different and apart from straight lines it had diagonal lines too. This signaled the way the players could move their coins. Unfortunately for me, I could not watch the entire game as I had a flight to catch, but I am planning on finding more about this game when I return to North Vietnam in a couple of weeks.