Việt Dũng

Businesses such as Board Game Era Coffee are using board games as a way to help Vietnamese and expats make new friends or practise their English. — VNS Photo Việt Dũng

HCM CITY — Board games can be great fun, and for many years expats in HCM City have been utilising them to help people make friends and learn a new language.

At a session on a Friday night at Board Game Era Coffee, a group of Vietnamese and expats played a social deduction game (a type of game where players are assigned different teams and try to discover each other’s hidden roles) without speaking a lick of Vietnamese.

The Vietnamese staff explained the rules and co-ordinated the game in English, the players discussed strategies with each other and made accusations and defended against them also in English.

One could also immediately tell that they all have great rapport with each another, constantly making in-jokes, cheekily fixing other’s grammar, and playfully cursing each other when things went chaotic, as board games often do.

Moments like that is probably one of the reasons as to why US expat Dustin Kemp and Vietnamese local Mai Thị Ánh Tuyết decided to open this business model in 2019.

Kemp tells Việt Nam News: “Board games are just a really cool hobby that help people who are generally more introverted to come out of their shell and meet new friends.

“We thought Saigon lacked inexpensive spaces to do fun activities like board games, so we created one. The awesome amount of laughter and intellectual stimulation board games create are a big bonus.”

The business has Vietnamese and expat hosts, whose jobs is to explain the games – in simple terms if the customers are beginners in either English or games in general.

Indeed, board games are a great social lubricant (in addition to alcohol, obviously), and so once players begin to understand the rules and get more invested in the games, they become garrulous.

Communication-heavy games help people open up while having a fun time. — VNS Photo Việt Dũng

​It is not only great for making new friends, but also for practising English speaking and listening skills, especially since the board game sessions welcome visitors from a wide range of nationalities and English levels.

“That process of having fun and making yourself heard is an extremely effective way to improve your conversational English,” Kemp says.

From my experience, even board games or card games that do not require communications and focus more on interacting with game pieces can create a comfortable environment and get people to open up – no one can ever stay silent when they have to pick up a bunch of UNO cards, after all.

Tuyết says board games helped improve her English too.

She was not too confident about her English communication skills, but was surprised by how quickly they improved after joining some of Kemp’s board game sessions.

Even though she struggled at first when he explained the rules, she was greatly interested in the fun and new games she had never heard of before, which motivated her to attend those sessions more often than the usual English-practice clubs.

There is a branch in Bàn Cờ Ward and another in Tân Hưng Ward.

In addition to English board game sessions, they also host Japanese ones, and are hoping to organise Chinese sessions as well in future, she says.

English teachers can also use board games to help students improve their skills. — Photo courtesy of Coffee Talk English

​For more “academically-focused” applications of board games, English education centre Coffee Talk English has been hosting fun board game nights every Thursday and Friday for the past nine years.

A typical night has English teachers hosting the games for a wide variety of visitors, from children to adults, from the centre’s own students to outsiders.

They also possess varying levels of English skills.

Visitors have a great time with the games and talking to each other, while the hosts encourage them to speak English or sometimes gently remind them if they use too much Vietnamese.

US expat Carl Eranio, who has been working for the centre for nine years, says: “Coffee Talk English was founded on the idea that you learn English through use.

“While the goal of the board game nights is to get people to learn English, we do not make that the whole point. We don't just sit there and be like ‘this is how you use these words’ or anything like that. Instead, we create the environment and then they have the opportunity to practise.”

In fact, some of the board games lean more towards teaching new vocabulary, and sometimes a host may get a student to translate the rules into Vietnamese – also a way to improve their English.

Eranio explains that a theory in English teaching called scaffolding has the teacher create simple sentence fragments or sentence beginnings to allow beginners to utilise them as much as they can.

This is what board games can help with – they allow young learners to learn various words and how they are associated with different things, piecing them together to slowly improve their skill level, he said.

“We have a large number of our students who take this and they generally attribute a lot of their English advancement to the practice they get, and the board games is where they have a lot of fun doing it.”

Vietnamese and expats love their board games, and whether it is for socialising or sharpening one’s communication skills, frantically talking yourself out of being falsely (or rightly) executed is a surefire way to do both! — VNS