Go to any café in Đà Nẵng and look around. A table of friends, four faces lit blue by four separate screens. Nobody is talking to the person across from them. I found this genuinely depressing — so I did something about it.
This is the story of how I founded DN Boardgame COM, the student boardgame community in Đà Nẵng, and why I think the answer to a lonely generation was sitting in a cardboard box the whole time.
The problem, plainly
I am in my early twenties. My generation is the one that forgot how to be in a room together. We go out, we sit down, and within four minutes everyone has a phone in their hand. I did it too. I hated it. I wanted a reason for people to have to look up.
The best social interaction is the one where you forget your phone exists.
Boardgames do something a group chat cannot. They force you to talk, to read a face, to lie convincingly, to negotiate, to cooperate with someone you met ten minutes ago. Different games train different muscles — a negotiation game teaches you to bargain, a social-deduction game teaches you to spot a liar, a party game just makes people laugh until they can't breathe.
Why I built it for students, in two languages
I could have just kept playing with my small group of friends. Instead I started a real community, open to students, because they are the ones who need it most — they are broke, new to the city, and desperate to meet people.
And I made it bilingual on purpose. Vietnamese and English, every session. Foreigners and expats show up to practise their Vietnamese; locals show up to practise English. Both sides leave knowing something about each other's culture they didn't that morning. A boardgame became a quiet little bridge between Vietnam and the rest of the world.
It stopped being about the games
Pretty soon people started asking me real-life questions over the table. How does insurance work? How do I know what job suits me? How do I get into a university abroad? So we started running workshops around the games — money, careers, English, the stuff school skips. The community grew to around nine hundred people. I am prouder of that number than any line of code I have ever written.
The thing I actually learned
If you give people a genuine reason to talk to each other, they will. The phone is not the enemy. The absence of a reason to look up is the enemy. Build the reason. They will put the phone down themselves.
— Lucas, Đà Nẵng. I still host the English boardgame night most weeks. Come say hi.