Yut Nori

Yut Nori is a Korean race game for 2 or 4 players. Each team races 4 pieces (말 — horses) around the cross-shaped board back to the start.

1. Throw the sticks (윷 던지기): Click "윷 던지기" to throw four wooden sticks. The number of flat (Yin) sides facing up determines how far you move — each result is named for a farm animal by its speed: Do (pig, 1), Gae (dog, 2), Geol (sheep, 3), Yut (ox, 4), Mo (horse, 5). Pieces travel counterclockwise around the board.
2. Move a piece: After throwing, select one of your pieces to move by the result value. Pieces that are not yet on the board enter from the start node.
3. Yut & Mo — throw again! Landing Yut (4) or Mo (5) earns you an extra throw. Use each queued move for a different piece.
4. Shortcuts: The three corner nodes (top-right, top, top-left) open diagonal shortcuts through the centre of the board — a faster route home.
5. Capture (잡기): Land on an opponent's piece to send it back to start — and earn another throw!
6. Stack (말업기): Land on a friendly piece to stack — both move together as one unit.
7. Win: First team to move all 4 pieces off the board wins.

Full rules guide & cultural history →

Yut Nori (윷놀이) is the great game of the Korean New Year season, played from Seollal (Lunar New Year) through Jeongwol Daeboreum, the first full moon. Families and whole villages take sides, and play is loud and communal — teams cheer each throw of the four birch half-sticks, which have a flat (Yin) belly and a rounded (Yang) back and are tossed two-handed onto a woven 멍석 (straw mat). The five results are named for livestock by their speed — Do (pig, 1), Gae (dog, 2), Geol (sheep, 3), Yut (ox, 4), and Mo (horse, 5) — with Yut and Mo earning another throw. The game is old: rock-carved boards and Joseon-era records attest to its long history, though no single founding date can be fixed.

The board is, by one documented reading, a map of the sky. The Joseon scholar Kim Munpyo, in his "Sadoseol," interpreted the round-outside, square-inside board as Heaven-round and Earth-square (天圓地方): the centre station, 방 (bang), is the North Star, and the twenty-eight outer stations are the twenty-eight lunar mansions. Play traces the Big Dipper's counterclockwise turn through the seasons — the four route-lengths were even named for the solstices and equinoxes. This is the documented Joseon scholarly reading of the board rather than a claim about why it was first drawn.

Yut was also a fortune-teller. In yut-jeom (윷점), a player made three throws to draw one of sixty-four outcomes, each paired with a short verse recorded in a surviving Joseon divination text — do-do-do, for instance, reads "a child meets its kind mother," an auspicious sign for the year ahead. The New Year team contest carried the same weight: the winning side was said to foretell a good harvest. One traditional twist is the back-do (백도): a single stick is specially marked (as on this board), and if it lands as the lone flat face it sends a piece one step backward — though this version plays the standard five results without the back-do rule.

Today Yut Nori still anchors Seollal gatherings, and village and city yut championships draw competitive teams, as do Korean-diaspora community halls abroad. The National Folk Museum of Korea preserves historic sets, including a finely worked coral yut (산호윷) — a reminder that this New Year pastime has been treasured, and beautifully made, for generations.