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Korean Games: The Games of Chance and Divination
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Free material for Culin's Korean games: three boards at playing size to print, the bridge from his 1895 spellings to the ones in use today, the register that keeps what he saw apart from what he concluded, and the guide to what you can actually sit down and play.
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Three boards to print and play on
PDF · US Letter · 4 pages
The nyout board — twenty marks round a circle and an interior cross of nine — the merrells board of twenty-four points, and the five-by-five lattice of four-field kono, at playing size on US Letter. Each carries the mark it carries in the book: EVIDENCE where Culin describes the board, RECONSTRUCTION where the starting array is this edition's reading. Coins or dried beans will do for men.
Open PDF438 KBA Note on the Spellings
PDF · US Letter · 2 pages
Sixteen of Culin's words against Revised Romanisation and McCune–Reischauer: nyout is yut, tjyang-keui is janggi, pa-tok is baduk. The book keeps his spellings, because changing them would quietly claim he wrote something he did not. This card is how you look anything up.
Open PDF68 KBThe Register of Record and Inference
PDF · US Letter · 2 pages
For each of the six parts: what Culin records at first hand, what he is told, what he concludes, and how to read the difference. He is a careful observer and a bold theorist, and the two are not the same instrument.
Open PDF70 KBThe playing guide
PDF · US Letter · 2 pages
Every game in the book a reader can actually sit down and play, with what Culin leaves out said plainly — and a section on what cannot be played from these pages at all, because a guide that lists only its successes is advertising.
Open PDF70 KB
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About this material
Stewart Culin died in 1929 and W. H. Wilkinson, who wrote the chapter on chess, died in 1930, so their text is in the public domain (source: Internet Archive, koreangameswith00culigoog). None of the 1895 plates or text figures is reproduced. Culin names two of his artists — Ki San, the Korean painter Kim Chun-gŭn, and Teotiku Morimoto — and no death year is recoverable for either; the remaining figures are unattributed. Every board on these sheets was drawn for this edition from the descriptions in Culin's text.