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
Every English guide to jwibulnori (쥐불놀이) files it in the same drawer: a folk ritual performed on the first full moon of the lunar year, when farmers burned the edges of their rice paddies to drive out rats and pests. That is where the game comes from. It is not what it was when I … Read more
Malttukbakgi (말뚝박기) is the Korean schoolyard game where one team bends over in a line and the other team runs and jumps on top of them. If that sounds less like a game and more like an accident waiting to happen, you have understood it correctly. It was also, for boys of my generation, one … Read more
If you search for how to play paengi chigi, almost every guide shows you the same scene: a child on frozen ground in winter, striking a wooden top with a small whip to keep it spinning. That version is real, and it is old. It is also not the game I played. I grew up … Read more
Every guide that explains how to play yutnori gets the rules right and the game wrong. The rules take about four minutes to learn. Four wooden sticks, a board of twenty-nine stations, four pieces per side, first side to bring all four home wins. That is genuinely all of it. What the rules do not … Read more