Tết family board game

by Vietanh Nguyen February 23, 2026

Story

Vietnam's first board game with AR

Every country has its unique festivals. Vietnam has many of its own. Those days are called "Tết".

We are kickstarting a campaign to make an Augmented-Reality powered board game where players can immerse in those festive days.

Players can scan any tile in this game and see stories, photos, and videos come to life.

Days of Tết

As the youngest child in the family, I always looked forward to those red-color calendar pages on the wall — the Tết holidays. Among them, Tết Trung Thu (Moon Festival) was the best. I got to eat mochi cakes filled with sweet lotus paste or grilled cakes packed with lạp xưởng and nuts. Tết Đoan Ngọ was another favorite. My mom would wake me up with a bowl of sticky rice in sweet liquor. She then told me that the bowl was to celebrate farmers exterminating pests in their rice fields. The amazing thing was that I could eat this dessert even before brushing my teeth!

Today, the Na Boardgames team proudly introduces another bilingual board game about all different Tết in Vietnam: Days of Tết (also Gà và Nếp).

Boiled chicken is a traditional Vietnamese offering for many Tết.

Gameplay

We want to make a game for families so simple that everyone can enjoy it together. The popular Tết games like "Cá Ngựa" (Pachisi) or "Cờ Tỷ Phú" (Monopoly) were straightforward and addictive. Our team member Khánh discovered that those games' ancestor was likely the Game of the Goose - one of the oldest board games on earth. For 400 years, the game has come to many cultures from Spain, France, UK, to the Netherlands. The game took on many themes to herald the virtues of kings, promote tourism, or even advertise a brand of cookies. Many people tried to reinvent the rules many times, but the original rules still stood the test of time.

We decided to continue this 400-year lineage of the Game of the Goose with our new game while introducing the following two new rules:

- The original rule: link. 2-4 players; 3+ years old; 10-15 mins games.

- New theme: All 63 tiles are meaningful Vietnamese Tết and festivals arranged chronologically from the beginning to the end of a Lunar-Calendar year.

- New rule 1: We replaced the 2 x D6 dice with a single D12 die to simplify each roll. We proved computationally that the game is ~1.5% faster and still balanced.

- New rule 2: As players advance through the game, they gain and make offerings (boiled chickens) to a pool. The winner takes all then redistributes their wealth into Lì Xì pockets before the next game.

Players roll D12 to advance through tiles of a lunar year.

What's in the box?

No rulebook! Our goal is to let family and friends just sit down and play. The centerpiece is our 4-fold map built with durable materials and vibrant colors. The map contains snippets of rules which the players could learn along the way. It takes only under 3 minutes to learn and 10-15 minutes to play each game in all of our playtesting.

18" x 18" foldable map with 63 dates of important Tết and local festivals.

All game pieces are fun and comfortable to hold

Acknowledge

Thanks to our partner team, Tiny Wrist, for every single step along the way.

Thank you, Quỳnh và Nam, for your help with game rules and photography.

Thank you, Trinh Bui, for your help with the gà luộc illustration.

Thank you, Chau Tran, for your help with probability theory and simulation.

Thank you, Chi, Nam Dương và Thảo Vy, for your help with playtesting.

Thank you, bác Phương Trâm, for in-depth research and stories on local festivals.

Vietnamese culture for everyone

Days of Tết (Gà và Nếp) is our 4th game about Vietnam.

Our previous game was about Language: It exceeded 3 ✕ Kickstarter Funding goals.

Our second game was about History: It won 3 awards at a Vietnam Game Design Contest.

Our first game was about Geography: It was featured in Seattle Asian Art Museum Store.

Our dream is to share the Vietnamese culture and diversity with our children and the world. Following is just one of sixty three festival stories included in this game:

English: The Khmer festivals

Khmer people live in groups in southern Vietnam, with hundreds of thousands in Soc Trang, Tra Vinh, Kien Giang, and a large number in other provinces. They have a lot of traditional festivals, which are mainly celebrated in the temples or at home, and accompanied by communal games and activities.

Sene Dolta (Harvest Festival): This typically occurs at the end of the rice harvest (July - August). Khmer people would give offerings to the spirits of their ancestors, and other wandering spirits, wishing for them to get to heaven. The offerings include small balls of cooked rice, which, having been blessed in the temple, will be distributed around the temple for the wandering spirits. On the 3rd day of Sene Dolta, Khmer people typically make boats from the banana trunk, decorated with colorful flags. Each boat carries two dummies, one male and one female, symbolizing the ancestors, and food, and other offerings. They launch these boats into a river or stream near their home, lighting incense as a way to send their ancestors back to heaven.

Vietnamese: Các lễ hội của người Khmer

Người Khmer sống thành quần thể tập trung ở các tỉnh nam bộ. Trong đó Sóc Trăng, Trà Vinh, Kiên giang có hàng trăm nghìn người, ở các thành phố khác cũng có hàng chục nghìn người mỗi tỉnh. Rất nhiều lễ hội đều có nghi thức chính tổ chức ở chùa hoặc ở nhà, kèm theo là các hoạt động vui chơi trong cộng đồng

Từ 16-30/8 âm lịch: Lễ Sene Dolta vào mùa thu hoach vụ lúa chính trong năm, là lễ dâng cơm lên cầu phúc cho ông bà tổ tiên được siêu thoát và cúng cho những vong hồn lang thang không nơi nương tựa (tương tự lễ cúng rằm tháng 7 của người kinh). Nét riêng trong lễ là trên mâm cơm cúng đặt trên tam bảo có nhiều nắm cơm nhỏ sau khi cúng sẽ được đem ra để quanh hành lang chính điện cho các vong hồn lang thang thụ hưởng. Ngày cúng thứ 3, người Khmer làm các con thuyền bằng bẹ chuối trang trí cờ phướn đẹp, trên thuyền có hình nộm 1 ông 1 bà tương trưng tổ tiên cùng các thức cúng kèm tiền vàng gạo muối rồi đem ra sông rạch gần nhà, thắp nhang thả thuyền xem như tiễn ông bà tổ tiên về trời

We need your help

Making a board game is hard. Sharing culture through the game is even harder. As independent game makers and toddler parents, we only got to work on this project of passion for a few hours each day after the babies go to sleep. We asked many of our friends and families to help with this project.

However, it's not enough. The project will fail if we don't have enough backers. We are still far away from our goal which is the minimum purchase order we can place with our manufacturer to get the board game price as low as $20 (which would normally be $50).

Please back us and share this project. If the project succeeds, we promise to include the following feature free of charge so that you can look up all Vietnamese festivals in English and Vietnamese, and easily calculate when to boil chicken and make sticky rice to celebrate with your family.