Yut Nori

How to play Yut Nori (Korean stick game)

Yut Nori (윷놀이) is one of Korea’s most beloved traditional games, played for well over a thousand years and still the centrepiece of family gatherings at Seollal, the Korean Lunar New Year. Instead of a die, players throw four flat wooden sticks; the way the sticks land — flat side up or rounded side up — decides how far a team moves its tokens, called mal, around a square board. It is a game of luck and bold decisions: a lucky Yut or Mo lets you throw again, capturing an opponent knocks their piece all the way home and earns a bonus, and gambling on the board’s diagonal shortcuts can win or lose the race. This version plays 2 to 4 teams on a single screen, and any seat can be filled by a friend or a computer bot.

The goal

Each team starts with a set of mal (2, 3 or 4, your choice) waiting off the board. Your goal is to walk every one of your mal all the way around the track and off the finish line before your rivals do. The first team to bring all of its mal home wins immediately. Because captures send enemy mal right back to the start, even a team that is far behind can surge into the lead with a single well-timed landing.

The four sticks and the throws

Yut Nori uses four sticks, each rounded on one side and flat on the other, thrown together. Count how many land flat side up — that number sets your move and its Korean name. Tap “Throw the sticks” and the app tumbles them for you.

• Do (도) — 1 stick flat: move 1 space.
• Gae (개) — 2 sticks flat: move 2 spaces.
• Geol (걸) — 3 sticks flat: move 3 spaces.
• Yut (윷) — all 4 sticks flat: move 4 spaces and throw again.
• Mo (모) — no sticks flat (all rounded up): move 5 spaces and throw again.

The board and the diagonal shortcuts

The board is a square outer ring of twenty stations with two diagonals that cross at a large centre station. Mal enter at the start corner and travel around the ring toward the finish, which sits back on the start corner. The corners and the centre are the big stations — they are the junctions where the diagonal shortcuts branch off.

• Landing exactly on a corner opens a shortcut. If a mal stops precisely on the top-right or top-left corner, its next move may leave along the diagonal toward the centre instead of continuing the long way around the ring.
• Landing exactly on the centre is the best shortcut of all. From the centre a mal may take either diagonal on its next move — carrying straight on, or diverting onto the line that runs directly to the finish.
• Shortcuts only work if you STOP on the junction. A mal that merely passes over a corner or the centre keeps to the route it was already on. To score, a mal must reach or pass the finish line — you do not need an exact throw; any roll big enough carries it home.

Captures, stacking and bonus throws

• Capture: land on a station holding an opponent’s mal and you send every enemy mal there straight back home to start again — and you immediately earn one extra throw.
• Stacking: land on your own mal and they combine into a single stack that travels together for the rest of the game. A stack of two, three or four mal moves as one piece and finishes all at once — powerful, but risky, because a single capture sends the whole stack home.
• Bonus throws: a Yut or a Mo lets you throw again, and every capture grants an extra throw too. Throw all your bonuses first, then apply each move value to a mal of your choice — you decide the order and which piece moves.
• Turns: teams throw and move in order. When you have used all your throws and moves, play passes to the next team, and finished teams are skipped.
• Winning: the first team to walk all of its mal around the board and off the finish line wins the game.

A Korean New Year tradition

Yut Nori is inseparable from Seollal, the Korean Lunar New Year, when three or four generations of a family gather and everyone — grandparents and small children alike — can join in. Teams are traditionally split by generation, or by married and unmarried members, and the throwing of the sticks is loud, communal and full of cheering. The sticks were historically made from split chestnut or birch branches, and in some regions a small marked “back-do” stick is used so a single flat stick can send a mal backwards; this app uses the simple, widely played version without back-do. Beyond the New Year, Yut Nori has long been used for fortune-telling and as a rainy-day pastime, and it remains one of the easiest traditional games to teach, because a single throw of the sticks explains almost everything.

Strategy tips

• Weigh the shortcuts carefully. Stopping on a corner or the centre can cut many spaces off your journey, but you have to land there exactly — plan your throws so a Gae or Geol drops a mal right onto a junction.
• Use captures to swing the game. Sending an opponent’s mal home not only wipes out their progress, it hands you a free extra throw, so one capture can quickly snowball into a huge turn.
• Stack with care. Doubling up mal moves them together and can finish two at once, but it turns them into a single juicy target. Stack when you are ahead or safe, and spread out when enemies are close behind.
• Spread your mal out early. Bringing several mal onto the board gives you more choices for each throw, more chances to capture, and lowers the risk that one unlucky capture wipes out a big stack.

Frequently asked questions