WiTurn: Is A Vietnamese Startup Going To Win The Chinese Chess App Battle?

If you do a few quick searches on AppAnnie, the Google Play store, and the Apple App Store for Chinese chess apps, you’ll quickly find that there are at least a hundred apps competing in this very niche genre. Most of them come from China and the US. WiTurn is one attempt from Vietnam at making Chinese chess – called ‘XiangQi’ in English – more accessible for people, as well as making it multi-platform. Instead of making a one-off app, the team of about five people is looking to build a long-term platform for the board game.

If you’re unfamiliar with XiangQi, let me give you a quick teaser. Much like ‘western’ chess, it’s an abstract strategy game that finishes when one of the two players checkmates the other player. But unlike chess, XiangQi has significantly different pieces and movements. For example, there is no queen in Chinese chess; instead there are cannons. Where chess is played across Europe, Russia, America, South America, and even Asia, XiangQi is condensed mainly in China, Vietnam, Japan, and surrounding countries.

Currently, WiTurn works on iOS, Android, the Kindle Fire, and any web browser, thus allowing players to sync their games and play across all the platforms that they’re using whenever they’re comfortable. I spoke to Phong Bui, one of the leads for the WiTurn project, who gave me the skinny on the new gaming platform.

Currently, we have 60,000 accounts with 3,000 daily active players and 30,000 per month. 90 percent of those players are in Vietnam. Every week, there’s over 85,000 games played.

Phong says that the project first started as a research and development project at KMS, one of Vietnam’s leading outsourcing companies. The team wanted to play around with the latest gaming technologies and decided to explore them on Chinese chess, their favorite game. He explains that the team’s creation does a lot of stuff that other Chinese chess platforms or apps don’t have:

WiTurn supports a wider range of platforms. There are very mature products in the market but they support either mobile or web, not both. Our players play under a poor 3G connection so we keep the connection alive. If the network lags for even one or two minutes, we can recover the connection and players can keep playing. WiTurn also supports both English and Vietnamese – no other client does that!

But I think WiTurn’s coolest feature has to be the ability to play “Cờ tướng úp” (or “mysterious chess” in Vietnamese). This style of play means that you don’t know what your pieces are until you move them into place. A very common Vietnamese type of Chinese chess that is commonly seen played on the streets of Saigon and in tournaments across the country.

In the next two to three months, WiTurn isn’t looking to monetize and will be focusing solely on developing the user experience and acquiring more users. When I asked him how he’d like to monetize, Phong didn’t want to answer yet but said that it’s in the plan and that they’ll be focusing mainly on the domestic Vietnamese market first.

You can download the iOS app here, the Android Playstore app here, the Android .apk here, or you can start playing right away on their website here.

(Editing By Steven Millward)

WiTurn: Is A Vietnamese Startup Going To Win The Chinese Chess App Battle?