Dang Thang has been passionate about chess since he was a child. The problem is that he’s never been any good at playing it.

Dang Thang and his GlobeChess set (Photo: Tien Phong)

With shabby skills on the board but a love for the game, Thang spent his youth thinking about chess – both Chinese and Western versions – and asking questions, rather than playing.

He wondered why the marshals didn’t join the battle in Xiangqi (Chinese chess).

“Why do the queens have to fight?” he pondered when watching Western chess.

In high school, he began to think of how he might invent an entirely new version of chess. He spent all his time thinking about it.

“My friends said I was wasting my time,” Thang said.

But he continued and eventually designed a chess board that resembled a flattened globe, with lines of latitude and longitude.

He divided the map in half, with one side for the black or blue (yang) team and the other for red (yin).

The new game, which he now calls Globe Chess, is a mix of Xiangqi and Western chess.

Each player has 22 pieces, including the original 16 pieces from Xiangqi plus an additional four Chinese pieces. These are then supplemented with a king and queen from Western chess.In this game, the marshals lead the battle, while in Xiangqi, the marshals play a role much more like the king in Western chess. But the objective of GlobeChess is to attack the king, like in the Western game.

During his time at the Posts and Telecommunications Vocational School in Ho Chi Minh City, Thang spent his free time developing a complicated series of moves that his warriors would be able to employ on the chessboard.

After four years, he completed the game in 2001