Learning how to play ddakji takes about two minutes. Getting good at it takes a whole childhood. Ddakji (딱지) is the Korean paper tile game where you slam your own folded tile onto the ground and try to flip your opponent’s tile over. Most people outside Korea met it in the opening episode of Squid … Read more
Most articles about Korean childhood games list the games. This one is about where the equipment came from, because that turns out to explain more. I grew up in Incheon in the 1980s and 90s. Looking back at what we played, the games sort cleanly into three groups — and the sorting has nothing to … Read more
The Korean games in Squid Game are all real. Not one of them was invented for the show. Ddakji, jegichagi, gonggi, spinning tops — Korean children have played all of these for generations, and some of us were still playing them in schoolyards in the 1990s. What English-language explainers usually get wrong is not the … Read more
If you discovered games like “Red Light, Green Light” or the paper-flipping ddakji through Netflix’s Squid Game, you’re in good company — the show introduced millions of people worldwide to Korean childhood games. But for those of us who grew up in 1980s Korea, these weren’t exotic curiosities. They were simply how we spent every … Read more