The next phase before the one-on-one speed dating rounds was another mini game, this time organized around the letter on each participant’s name tag.
Earlier in the evening, everyone had been assigned a number and a letter. The number determined the small table group in the previous activity. This time, the letter mattered. All participants with the same letter were grouped together, so the A’s stayed with A’s, the B’s with B’s, and so on. My group was one of the later ones to go, and by the time it was our turn, the basic stakes were clear: this was a competitive group challenge, and the winning team would receive a voucher, something like a two-for-one mini-golf prize.
On paper, that sounds simple enough. In practice, the game was much harder to understand than it needed to be.
The closest comparison would be charades, but even that is not quite right. Normally, a charades-style game works because the prompt is visually clear or universally legible. Someone sees a word or picture, then has to act it out or describe it, and the rest of the group tries to guess. The format is intuitive. This version was more layered. A participant would read a prompt in Vietnamese, then try to express it in English, and the group would guess the answer in either Vietnamese or English. The prompts seemed to involve proverbs, sayings, or culturally familiar expressions, the kind of thing that makes sense if you grew up immersed in Vietnamese language and reference points.
A Game That Rewarded Cultural Fluency
That distinction mattered immediately.
Because the game relied so heavily on shared cultural context, it was not equally accessible to everyone in the room. For someone fully inside that world, it may have felt playful and natural. For me, as someone with partial but incomplete Vietnamese fluency, it felt like standing near the center of the activity without fully being inside it.
That became obvious in my group. There was confusion at the start about how exactly the prompts were supposed to be translated and answered. Because I could speak English, some of the team instinctively deferred toward me for that side of the task, while one of the men I had already met earlier became a kind of informal translator. But even once he translated something into English, that did not necessarily help much, because the problem was not just language in the narrow sense. The problem was shared background knowledge. If the answer depended on understanding a specifically Vietnamese expression or way of thinking, then translating the sentence alone did not make the game equally legible.
So what happened was predictable. A few people on the team carried most of the performance. One man got several of the answers, and one woman got a couple as well. The rest of us were trying to orient ourselves in real time. By the end, I think our team got five correct. The winning team got eight.
That outcome was not disastrous. We did reasonably well. But the experience still highlighted the same problem I had noticed in the earlier mini game: the structure looked more inclusive from the outside than it felt from within.
When a Game Needs Too Much Decoding
And that is the key point.
A good social game should reduce friction and create shared momentum. It should not require participants to decode the rules, decode the language, and decode the cultural premise all at once. Once a game demands that much interpretation, it stops being a clean interaction tool and starts becoming a filter for who already belongs most naturally inside the setting.
That seemed to be the case here.
Even before our turn began, there was some planning among the group about how to approach the challenge. That part was actually interesting, because it briefly created a sense of team coordination. But even there, not everyone really engaged. Two members of the group stayed more on the sidelines and did not seem especially interested in standing up and participating directly. So even within the team format, involvement was uneven. In practice, the real activity was being carried by a smaller number of people while the rest hovered around the edges.
Again, that does not make the idea bad in itself. The issue was execution.
If the organizers wanted a true group-bonding game, a simpler format would likely have worked better. Something visual, something more intuitive, something less dependent on specifically Vietnamese sayings or verbal translation chains. A standard picture-based charades round, or a word-association game with broader accessibility, would have made it easier for everyone to participate on equal footing. Instead, this version rewarded the people who were already culturally and linguistically aligned with the room.
Structure Has Limits
That is useful to notice, especially in an event that included at least some participants who were not operating at full fluency.
So my reaction to this third pre-dating activity was mixed. It did create group energy. It did produce some coordination and a bit of competitive spirit. But it also reinforced the fact that the event was overwhelmingly being run for Vietnamese-native participants, with English functioning more as an occasional bridge than as a fully integrated part of the design.
That was not always a problem. But here, in a game built on expression and recognition, it became one.
By the end of this phase, the broader pattern of the evening was becoming clearer. The event had structure. It had effort behind it. It had branded activities and visible planning. But again and again, the quality of the participant experience depended not just on the format itself, but on whether the format actually matched the people using it.
This game did not completely fail. But it revealed another limit of structure: a mechanic can be organized and still not be equally playable for everyone in the room.
And that was the final impression before the event moved into the one-on-one speed dating rounds.
