Art Around the World: South Korea (Ddakji Game)

Ahn-yong!
Hello, and welcome to another art around the world post. This isn't technically art but it is a fun game you can play with your kids.

What is Ddakji you ask?

Ddakji, sometimes referred to as ttakji, is a traditional Korean game played using folded paper disks. All you need to play are the folded origami ddakji disks.

What you will need:

• two sheets of square origami paper for each disk you want to make (we used regular astrobright paper). The size of the paper does not matter as long as they are square. 

You can use any kind of paper you have, to make it square here is a quick video showing you how. He suggests licking the paper to cut it but I used scissors ;).

Folding the paper can be a good introduction to basic origami and can help with practicing those fine motor skills. I watched a couple of videos before hand so that I could help the boys fold their disks. I'll link a video at the end of this post for those who are visual learners. Both boys were able to fold their disks with very little assistance from me.

 How to play the game:

• Choose a throwing player (we went with the youngest goes first rule but you can decide however you would like).
• The other player places his/her disk on the table. The throwing player tries to throw his disk so that it makes the other players disk flip over. If he is successful he gets to keep the disk. We made several disks so that we could play the game much longer. 

This sounds simple but it is actually a lot harder than it looks. I had to warn my kids ahead of time that it takes practice to flip the disks over, and that it is okay if they aren't able to. We were never successful in flipping the disks over but they enjoyed playing never the less. 

Here is a video of the boys playing the game. Sorry I didn't realize my finger was in the video part of the way :).

Here is a video on the folding instructions.

I hope you try this fun game with your kids :).


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