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
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
When Squid Game opened its first episode with hundreds of players sprinting across a field while a giant doll chanted, then froze them with a single glance, the world met a Korean childhood game for the first time. Strip away the deadly stakes and that game is something every Korean grew up playing in schoolyards … 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 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