Lunar Festival Gambling – Bau Cua Ca Cop
Whenever I go to a store that primarily caters to an immigrant ethnic population, I always make sure to poke around the home goods areas and look for imported games from their culture. While in a Vietnamese store some years ago, I picked up a set used for playing Bầu cua cá cop (“shrimp-crab-fish”). Naturally, it didn’t include any instructions, but after a little digging, I found that it’s a pretty simple dice game, usually played during Tết, the Lunar New Year.
Sometime later, I was working for a company with a production staff largely made up of Vietnamese immigrants. The managers knew about my obsession with games, and asked me to bring a “team” game to play for an office Christmas party. This would normally have been an easy task, since I have many cooperative games that I can teach even to people who don’t really play board games. But, with the language barrier, I doubted I could explain any rules properly if they didn’t already know it.
That’s when I remembered the dice game I’d picked up – I showed a picture of it to the supervisor of the production staff, and she immediately got excited and started talking to everyone about it. Based on later interactions with immigrants, I imagine she was mostly surprised I even knew the game existed.
A Game of Many Names
Bầu cua cá cop is of course only the game’s name in Vietnam. There are many games with identical rules played elsewhere. An alternate Vietnamese name (I can only guess it’s because of regional dialects) is Lắc bầu cua (“shake the dice”). When the game made its way into China, it became popularized as Hoo Hey How, which admittedly is the most fun name to say, though the proper Romanization of the characters is yú xiā xiè (“fish-prawn-crab”). Khlaa Khlook (“leopard”) is the name of the game in Cambodia. When we get to the rules, you’ll find that the animal-based names are due to the game being played with three dice inscribed with pictures of animals to match those on the board.
Whether developed independently, or during early trade voyages, it seems the British ended up with their own version of the game, again with identical rules, and also using picture-dice. Rather than animals, the pictures in Crown and Anchor are the four French card suits, along with the titular crown and anchor symbols. They then popularized their version of the game – it’s Langur Burja (“Langur Tower”) in Nepal, where the anchor is replaced by a flag, and six dice are used instead of three. The French replace the crown with a sun and call it Ancre, Pique, et Soleil (“anchor, spade, and sun”), as do the Flemish with Anker en Zon (“anchor and sun”).
Why at Festivals?
Throughout history, states and religions have tended to outlaw or otherwise forbid gambling at all times. However, it seems that in Hinduism, there is an exception made, but only during Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights. This is due to a story where Lord Shiva and the Goddess Parvati played a game of pachisi. Parvati prayed to Lakshmi (the goddess of prosperity) and won the game. Afterward, Parvati declared that gambling on Diwali night would bring prosperity, but only on that night – it was still forbidden during the rest of the year.
Naturally, I’m not sure whether this. concept spread throughout Asia, but given the similarity in attitudes around gambling during the change in the Lunar year, I suspect it as a possibility.
How to Play
The game itself is fairly straightforward. Place your bet on one or more of the six pictures on the board, then roll the three dice, which are inscribed with symbols matching the board. Each time symbol with a bet on it appears, that bet is returned and paid by a matching amount. More matches equals a higher payout – one die means you double your money, two dice means triple, and three dice gives you your bet plus three times the amount, quadrupling your money. If no dice match, you lose your bet.
In this example, our gambler bet two coins on the gourd (specifically a calabash squash). After rolling the dice, two of them showed the gourd face on top. They receive a 2:1 payout – their original bet, plus two times that from the house, which triples their money. So they get their original two coins back, and win four coins, for a total of six.
You are of course allowed to bet on more than one space, which increases your chance of at least one die showing a winning picture, while simultaneously increasing your losses should your other bets not pay off.
When playing with a large group, it’s common for multiple people to bet at the same time. Naturally, this speeds up the game, as well as increasing the losses to the house, but sparks excitement as the group eagerly waits to see who wins and loses. The tone at the table becomes closer to that of a game of Craps or Roulette.
International Variants
As I mentioned before, there are many versions of this game around the world, each with exactly the same rules – bet on one or more spaces, and receive a payout based on how many dice show your chosen image. Except for Lagur Burja, they are all also played with three dice. Just for fun, let’s see what the alternatives are for those pictures, based on a numbered die face. From left to right, here are the picture sets in an imaginary die numbered from 1 up through 6.
Khlaa Khlook
Hoo Hey How
Hoo Hey How (regional variant)
Crown & Anchor
Parting Thoughts
I only really learned about bầu cua cá cop because I tend to pick up any game that appears to be traditional to a culture when I run across it. And to be honest, I initially didn’t give it much thought, because it’s a very basic gambling game – roll the dice and hope you bet on the right faces – pure luck. it was just part of my collection, likely never to be played.
But that day, when I showed a picture to an old Vietnamese woman in the hopes that she’d at least know how to play and I would only need to teach the English-speakers at the company – I saw pure joy in her face. In that moment, I had brought to her a piece of her childhood, reminded her of home and growing up and everything that entails. She literally rushed off to share that with everyone on the team, and I soon had a crowd of people overcome with happiness that somebody in this foreign country had really seen them.
And that – that moment right there – is why I keep learning and teaching games from everywhere I can discover, because you never know when you might be able to make a meaningful connection with someone, and a game can help with that.
Enjoy the Lunar New Year, everyone!
