A traditional game on a snack jar: storytelling through play

The Let's PLAY Cheese Ball and Maize Ball jars come with an ô ăn quan board printed on the label, and the snacks inside serve as the playing pieces. The game sits on the packaging because this brand exists for moments when food is shared, and because a folk game tells a Vietnamese story faster than any paragraph could. This piece is about the reasoning behind that choice, and about what a game can and cannot do for a snack brand.

What ô ăn quan is

Ô ăn quan is a game most Vietnamese people learn as children. The board is traditionally scratched into the ground: two large squares at either end, called the quan squares, and two rows of small squares between them for the ordinary pieces. The pieces are whatever pebbles are to hand, with a bigger stone for each quan square. Two players take turns picking up the pieces from one of their squares and sowing them one by one around the board. Depending on where the last piece lands, a player captures pieces or loses the turn. Whoever holds more at the end wins.

Its charm is how little it needs: a flat surface, a handful of pebbles, two people and some arithmetic. There is no set to buy. That is exactly what makes it fit on a snack jar.

Why a game belongs on food packaging

We did not put a game on the jar to make the packaging look unusual. There are four more practical reasons:

• The occasion. Cheese Ball and Maize Ball are snacks for sharing, at a homework table, with guests or on a trip. A board on the jar matches that moment.
• Time with the product. A snack pack is usually opened, emptied and thrown away within minutes. With a board, the jar stays on the table longer and gives people something to talk about.
• A story without text. The brand is preparing for export, which means many shoppers will not read Vietnamese. An ô ăn quan board tells a story about Vietnam in pictures, and a few lines of rules are enough.
• A second job for the packaging. Once the snack is finished, the jar is still a game board. It gets kept instead of binned.

There are also things a game cannot do. It does not make the snack taste better. It does not replace the mandatory information on the label. If the flavour is not right, the prettiest board is still only a board.

What the game says about the brand

Each of the four Color of Vietnam brands has its own voice. PLAY Nutrition speaks to active days, PLAY Protein Bar to its protein range, Natural & Healthy to the ingredient, and Let's PLAY to play and sharing. The ô ăn quan board is the clearest expression of that fourth voice. It says the brand is playful, that it belongs to Vietnam, and that this food is meant to be eaten with other people.

This is also where our value of Taste First meets the fun. We keep the game in its proper place: something added once the flavour is right. Ingredients, pack size, best-before date and storage conditions are printed clearly where they are easy to read. The fun is not allowed to crowd out the facts.

How we build the board onto the jar

The work starts with a very practical question: does the jar label have room for a board, the rules and the mandatory text. The design team draws a few layouts, prints them on paper, sticks them onto real jars and puts the jars on a table. Then the team plays against each other using actual Cheese Balls and Maize Balls, to find out whether the snacks work as pieces, whether the squares are wide enough and whether someone who has never played can follow the printed rules straight away.

Most of the changes come from that play test rather than from the screen. One layout looked good on a monitor but its squares were too small for the snack. Another had rules that ran too long and had to be cut to a few lines. It is the same small-trial habit we use for everything, from flavour to packaging.

If you work in marketing or design and ideas like this appeal to you, have a look at our open roles. If you are a distributor who would like a snack jar with a game on it on your shelf, get in touch and we will send samples.