Bài Chắn

The cards and their history

The full pack has 30 faces, with four copies of each: ranks Nhất through Cửu in the Vạn, Văn, and Sách suits, plus Chi Chi, Thang Thang, and Ông Lão (Ông Cụ). That is 27 numbered faces and three special faces, or 120 cards. The common 100-card Chắn pack omits all three Nhất faces, Thang, and Lão, four copies of each. Pagat's card inventory documents the full pack; the game collection lists the 20 cards removed for ordinary Chắn.

The deck belongs to a wider family of East Asian money-suited cards, with Chinese-character rank and suit marks. Surviving decks were made by the Marseille firm A. Camoin & Cie for use in Vietnam; some familiar figures wear Japanese-style clothing. A collector documents examples from roughly the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Another collection points to an earlier textual mention of a possible precursor, Tụ tam bài, in Phạm Đình Hổ's Nhật dụng thường đàm; I have not yet checked that original passage. The surviving cards show cultural influences and card manufacture, but do not establish that the game itself was invented in Japan or in France. Its exact origin remains an open historical question. See The World of Playing Cards and the game collection's historical note.

Does “Chắn” name the deck or our game?

In the rules, a chắn is a pair of identical cards; a cạ is a pair of the same number in different suits. Đánh chắn means “to play Chắn”; it is not a separate variant name. In everyday speech, bài chắn can mean the game or the cards used for it. Chắn is therefore a meaningful game name, but it does not by itself specify whether a family removes 20 cards. Calling ours “my family's 120-card Chắn” is the clearest description until we find a more established name for this exact ruleset.

A comment under a 2024 video about Tổ Tôm independently remembers a family Tết game called bài chắn with 120 cards. The writer recalls alternating red and blue decks and names Tôm, Lèo, Bạch Định, Thập Điều, and Bạch Thủ. Another commenter says there are several Chắn styles, including play with Yêu cards. These are promising leads, not proof that either table follows every one of my family's rules.

I checked two more Chắn lessons against that 120-card recollection. In a player's rules demonstration, the speaker twice says the deck has 100 cards. He describes four players, 19-card hands, a 20-card win, and at least six chắn. He later teaches Tôm and Lèo as scoring calls in that same 100-card game. I also read all 44 retrievable comments under a Chắn Sân Đình developer tutorial and all 37 under the player's lesson; neither thread identifies a 120-card Chắn game. This makes the earlier comment's explicit 120-card count the useful clue. Tôm and Lèo alone do not distinguish the deck.

A card-identification tutorial makes the conventional distinction especially clear: Tổ Tôm has 120 cards, while Chắn removes 20 and uses 100. The presenter later counts 25 Chắn faces with four copies each and says the Nhất rank is absent. A commenter likewise names Nhất, Thang, and Ông Cụ as additions for Tổ Tôm. I also checked a long online match and two short play recordings. Their visible three-player tables show a stock counter at 23 early in play, consistent with the 100-card tutorial's dealing method, but they do not explicitly inventory the deck. None provides a positive example of 120-card Chắn.

In another online match, the audio says Tôm as the game displays a winning score with one Tôm and one Ăn Bòn. An earlier result screen lists Tám Đỏ and Chíu; opening rounds show a stock counter at 23. The clip and its 11 retrievable comments offer no explicit 120-card claim. It confirms why scoring words must be read alongside the card count and table rules.

Open questions

Our family still needs concrete examples for a few special Cạ, claim priority, return-card wins, the last wall card, and scoring. I will revise the rules as we test them together, with dated examples of complete hands.