Yut facts for kids

Yut is a fun and traditional Korean board game. People often play it around the Korean New Year. It's also known as Cheok-sa or sa-hee. This game has been played for a very long time, possibly since the ancient Three Kingdoms period in Korea. To play, you throw four special sticks and move your game pieces, called mal, around a board. It's a popular game because anyone can play it, no matter their age, and you can enjoy it almost anywhere!

How to Play Yut

What You Need

The Yut game board

To play Yut, you need a few things. Each team will have a game board, four special yut sticks, and four game pieces. These pieces are called mal.

The game board is usually shaped like a rectangle. It can be made from different materials, like cloth, paper, or even leather. The board has a circle with a cross in the middle. Around this cross, there are 28 other circles.

The yut sticks are very important. They tell you how far your mal can move. Each stick has two sides: one is round, and the other is flat. These sticks are often made from wood, like chestnut trees.

Your mal are your game pieces. You move them around the circles on the board. You can use almost anything as a mal, as long as you can tell your pieces apart from your opponents' pieces.

Four yut sticks

Game Rules

The way the yut sticks land after you throw them tells you how many steps you can move your mal. There are five different ways the sticks can land. Each way has a special name and a number of steps. These names are do, gae, geol, yut, and mo. They are named after five different animals: pigs, dogs, cows, sheep, and horses.

• Do: If only one flat side of a stick faces up, it's a do. This means you move one step forward.
• Gae: If two flat sides are up, it's a gae. You move two steps forward.
• Geol: When three flat sides are up, it's a geol. This lets you move three steps forward.
• Yut: If all four sticks land with their flat sides up, it's a yut. This means you move four steps forward.
• Mo: If all four sticks land with their round sides up, it's a mo. This is the biggest move, letting you go five steps forward.

• 

  do

• 

  gae

• 

  geol

• 

  yut

• 

  mo

Teams usually take turns throwing the sticks. But if you throw a yut or a mo, you get an extra turn to throw the sticks again!

Moving Your Game Pieces

When it's your turn, you usually move one mal for each throw. However, if you have two or more mal on the same circle, they can group together. Then, they all move at the same time!

The board has some special circles that act as shortcuts. If your mal lands on the big circle in the center, or on one of the circles in the corners, you can take a shorter path. There are four possible shortcut routes your mal can take.

• 

  Route 1

• 

  Route 2

• 

  Yut Route 3

• 

  Yut Route 4

What happens if your mal lands on a circle where an opponent's mal already is? Your mal captures the opponent's mal! The captured mal must go back to the very beginning and start over.

The goal of the game is to get all of your mal to move around the board and return to the starting point. The first team to get all their mal back to the start wins the game!

• Kim Sang-hoon "Yut playing, a traditional four-stick game" [1]

See also

In Spanish: Iut para niños