Cast the four sticks, gamble on the diagonal shortcuts, and race all four of your horses home.
Yut Nori is a traditional Korean race game played by casting four flat sticks. The result tells you how far to move a horse around a square ring of stations, and the first player to bring all four horses home wins.
The long way round is 21 steps: all 20 stations of the ring, plus one more to carry the horse past the starting corner. The shortcuts cut that down. Rest on the first corner and the diagonal through the centre brings you home in 17. Rest on the second corner and its diagonal does it in 16.
The best case is rarer. Open with a Mo: five steps from the start puts a new horse exactly on the first corner, and Mo earns another cast. Throw a Geol, three steps, and the horse stops exactly on the centre, where it turns down the home diagonal. Any later cast of three or more takes it home. That is 11 steps for a 21-step journey.
How likely is that? In this version each stick is equally likely to land either way, so each of the four sticks is a coin toss. Gae (two flat sides up) is the most common cast at 6 in 16, Do and Geol come up 4 times in 16 each, and Yut and Mo just once in 16 each. Opening with a Mo and following it with a Geol happens about once in 64 games.
Yut nori is a traditional Korean race game, also called cheoksa, with roots in Korea's Three Kingdoms period (57 BCE – 668 CE). Goryeo-era documents already illustrate the board with its 29 stations, the same count as here: 20 around the ring, eight on the diagonals and one at the centre. It is played above all at Seollal, the Lunar New Year, and at Jeongwol Daeboreum fifteen days later, when families gather and play it together across generations.
Four wooden sticks are thrown, and the combination of flat and rounded faces gives five outcomes, each named for an animal — pig, dog, sheep, cow, horse — in ascending order of movement. The board was read as a map of the sky: the mid-Joseon writer Gim Munpyo described it as the circle of the cosmos, with the North Star at the centre surrounded by the 28 constellations, and the flat and rounded faces of the sticks are taken to stand for yin and yang.
The rules vary from house to house. In the traditional game a horse that lands on a corner may choose whether to take the shortcut, and some families mark one stick so that it moves a horse backwards. This version always takes the shortcut, since it is almost always the better move, and leaves the backward stick out. Landing on an opponent sends them back and grants another throw, which is where the shouting comes from.
Yut Nori is an original, free browser recreation of the Korean New Year race, made for PlayPendium: the 29-station board, the four sticks and their five animal casts, stacking and capturing, with three computer levels, hot-seat play on one device, and online matches by invite code or quick-match.