Yut Nori rules and tips

What this game is

Yut Nori (윷놀이) is a Korean game played by throwing four halved wooden sticks and moving pieces by the shape they land in. Unlike a six-sided die, each stick has only two faces (flat or round), so the four thrown together give a lumpy, not-flat distribution, and that lumpiness is a large part of the game's feel.

Nobody knows exactly when it started, but it is old enough that late Joseon-era writing already compared the board's shape to the sky, the earth, and the constellations. One popular explanation ties the names Do, Gae, Geol, Yut, and Mo to five livestock (pig, dog, sheep, ox, and horse), though that is one theory among others. What has not changed is that it is a holiday game, played by a group at Lunar New Year or the first full moon of the year.

How this app differs from traditional Yut Nori

Traditional Yut Nori is played on a board, moving pieces. Shortcuts, capturing an opponent's piece to send it back, and stacking your own pieces to move together all come from that board. This app has none of that: no board, no pieces, no capturing or stacking, and no taking turns against an opponent.

Instead, the steps you throw simply stack up until you lock them in as points. So the steps themselves are the score, rather than something that moves a piece. What this app keeps from the traditional rules is exactly three things: deciding Do/Gae/Geol/Yut/Mo from four sticks, throwing again for free on Yut or Mo, and Baekdo. Everything else is this app's own design.

Basic rules: sticks and steps

How many flats do you see

Each stick has two faces: a flat side and a round side. Throw all four at once and count how many land flat-side up. Which specific stick is flat does not matter, only the count.

One flat is Do (one step), two is Gae (two steps), three is Geol (three steps). All four flat is Yut (four steps), and zero flat is Mo (five steps). Steps run from one through five, but confusingly, the biggest value comes from the fewest flats.

Yut and Mo earn another throw

Landing Yut or Mo banks that many steps and immediately grants another throw. If that throw is also Yut or Mo, you throw again. This guide calls a chain of such throws one "turn." Do, Gae, or Geol ends the turn right there.

Baekdo

One of the four sticks is marked. If exactly one stick lands flat and it happens to be the marked one, that is not Do. It is Baekdo instead. In traditional play this moves a piece back one space; this app treats it far more harshly. What exactly you lose is spelled out in the next section.

This app's specific rules

From here on, this describes exactly what the app does, using the same words and numbers that appear on screen.

Stages, turns, and goals

A run has eight stages, each with a goal to clear. The goal starts at eight steps and rises by nine each stage: 8, 17, 26, 35, 44, 53, 62, 71. Each stage gives you three turns. Clear the goal within three turns and you move up a stage; fail all three and the run ends there.

Anything scored beyond the goal does not carry into the next stage. The moment you advance, your stage score resets to zero and your turns refill to three. Unused turns do not carry over either. Your total score, however, keeps everything you have ever banked.

Throw again versus bank it now

Throwing adds that turn's steps to your run total, which is not yours yet. Pressing "Bank it now" locks that total into your stage score and total score and spends one turn. Pressing "Throw again" lets you stack more on top, but a Baekdo wipes out everything stacked this turn.

A Baekdo also destroys any Yut- or Mo-chained steps earned earlier in the same turn. Your run total drops to zero and the turn still counts as spent. It is not just a missed throw. It collapses everything gathered so far. Note that even endless Yut/Mo chains are capped at twelve throws per turn.

Charms are not chosen

Clearing a stage grants one charm automatically. There is no picking screen, just whatever is set for that stage that day. A lucky pouch adds three steps, a string of coins adds five.

What matters is when the bonus applies: charms are not single-use, they add every time you bank. Holding three charms means every "Bank it now" adds all three bonuses at once. A Baekdo collapse, though, means the bank never happened, so no charm bonus is gained either.

The same board every day

The board is generated from that day's date. Everyone who plays on the same day gets the exact same yut throws. Throwing and scoring all happen in your browser, so nothing is sent to a server and no account is needed.

One honest note: each throw's outcome is fixed purely by the date and the throw count. So what your Nth throw of the day will be is decided from the start, and no matter where you stop, that value never changes. Your choices do not change which outcomes appear, only how you group and bank them.

Saving progress and starting over

An in-progress run is saved in this browser, so refreshing or closing and reopening the tab picks up where you left off. If the date has changed or the saved data does not match today's run, it is discarded and a new run starts. Once a run ends you can play again, and on the same day you will meet the same yut throws from the start.

Copying your result includes how far you got, how many times you hit Baekdo, and your total score. It does not include what came up on each individual turn, so sending it to someone who has not played yet does not spoil anything.

Basic tips

What comes up, and how often, on one throw

Each of the four sticks lands flat with 50/50 odds independently, so there are sixteen equally likely outcomes. Counting them out: Gae is 6/16 (37.5%, most common), Geol is 4/16 (25%), Do is 3/16 (18.75%). Yut, Mo, and Baekdo are each 1/16 (6.25%).

Notice that one of the four "one flat" cases turns into Baekdo instead of Do. Of the four ways to get exactly one flat, the one where the marked stick is the flat one is Baekdo, so Do is 3/16, not 4/16.

The average steps from one throw is 2.25: multiply each outcome's steps by its probability and sum, giving 36/16. If that feels lower than expected, it is because Gae shows up almost half the time.

A turn collapses 1/14 of the time

Pressing "throw" once starts a turn, and Yut or Mo chains it further. Baekdo risk follows you through every throw in the chain. The probability that a turn eventually ends in Baekdo works out to 1/14, about 7.1%. Roughly one press in fourteen wipes out everything stacked so far.

A turn's average yield, counting collapsed turns as zero, is 2.53 steps; counting only turns that did not collapse, it is 2.72. So even a turn that goes well tends to yield less than you'd think. The big hauls come from rare turns where Yut and Mo chain together.

Only throw as much as the goal needs

Because anything over the goal is lost at the stage change, gathering exactly enough is all you need. If five more steps clear the goal, stacking ten and continuing to throw only buys risk. Watch the goal display alongside your run total, and once charms plus your total clear the goal, make it a habit to stop right there.

Advanced tips

The break-even point is 35 steps

Looking only at total score, whether to push for one more turn has a calculable answer. One more turn earns 2.53 steps on average but risks losing everything stacked so far with probability 1/14. So if P is your current stack, the expected value of one more turn is 2.53 minus P divided by 14. That value hits zero around 35 steps.

Below 35 steps, pushing for one more turn is worth it on average; past 35, it costs you on average. If you're holding charms, treat that 35 as your stack plus your charm total. With five points of charm bonus, you are effectively at the break-even point already at 30 stacked steps.

This 35-step figure is a total-score calculation, though. When the goal is to clear a stage, the number you actually need is the relevant figure, and even the highest stage's goal split three ways is only around 24, usually under 35. Gathering only what you need does not conflict with the break-even math.

How far to aim, and how often you'll make it

The odds of reaching a target step count before hitting Baekdo have also been worked out: 77% for 8 steps, 70% for 12, 50% for 24, 38% for 35.

What this table shows is that success drops fast the bigger a single push you attempt. Aiming for 24 in one go fails half the time; with three turns available, splitting it into roughly 8 per turn is far safer. As later stages raise the goal, splitting it up gets harder, and that is where the game gets tough.

Charms change the math

Charms add up one per stage and apply on every bank, so their weight grows in later stages. Clear seven stages and hold seven charms, and a single bank adds somewhere between 21 and 35 automatically, averaging around 28. In this range, throwing just one turn and banking immediately is often the best move.

Remember, though, that you cannot bank at zero. To collect the charm bonus at all, you need at least one successful turn, and that turn still has a 1/14 chance of collapsing. The more charms you hold, the more that one turn is worth, which reduces the case for pushing a second turn.

Same day, same yut

As noted earlier, what your Nth throw of the day will be is fixed in advance. So pressing "play again" replays the same sequence from the start, and you begin your second run already knowing roughly where the Baekdo lands. Deciding differently where to stop can change your outcome a great deal.

Whether to use that knowledge is up to taste. If experiencing the sequence fresh is more fun, save "play again" for another day; if you want to find the best line through today's sequence, restart as many times as you like. The score of a finished run can go to the ranking, so pick whichever way you prefer to play.

Common sticking points

The "Bank it now" button is missing

"Bank it now" only appears once this turn's run total is one step or more. If you haven't thrown yet, or just collapsed on a Baekdo, the total is zero and there is nothing to bank. In that state, only "throw again" is available.

The score reset to zero after clearing the goal

That is not a bug. Clearing the goal ends the stage, resetting your stage score to zero and raising the goal by nine. Steps earned in earlier stages remain in your total score . Check the total score on screen.

Yut keeps coming up but I still can't clear the goal

Yut and Mo are a big earning opportunity because they chain, but every extra link in the chain also takes on fresh Baekdo risk. The longer a chain runs, the more there is for the whole turn to lose. Watching results line up on screen feels great, but the longer that line gets, the more you have already stacked, which usually means it's closer to time to stop, not further.

I keep getting stuck at later stages

Past stage six, the goal exceeds fifty. Splitting that across three turns needs at least seventeen or so per turn, where success drops into the 60% range. So later stages come down to how early you gathered charms. Getting greedy in early stages and losing a turn to Baekdo delays your charms, and that delay becomes a wall later. Cashing out early, even when it feels overly cautious, tends to get you further in the end.

It feels like a bad-luck day

The yut sequence really is different every day, so some days genuinely run rough. Still, the per-turn Baekdo rate is always 1/14, on every single day. If things feel unusually bad, first suspect that you were holding on past the break-even point rather than blaming the sequence. If your total was already past thirty and you kept pushing, that was a decision, not bad luck.