Childhood memories often return without warning—sometimes triggered by a scent, sometimes by an old photo, and sometimes by something as unexpectedly simple as a folded piece of paper. For many Koreans who grew up in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, one such memory is 딱지치기 (Ddakji), a traditional paper-flipping game that was once an unquestioned staple of neighborhood childhood. Then, in 2021, Netflix's Squid Game brought Ddakji to the entire world—and for Korean viewers of a certain age, the reaction was a mix of warm recognition and mild bewilderment. Because the Ddakji scene in Squid Game looks almost nothing like how the game was actually played.
Ddakji was a game I played long before I ever set foot in an elementary school classroom. It required no adult supervision, no instructions, no equipment you had to buy, and no app to download. It was simply part of the air of the neighborhood, absorbed through watching older kids and then joining in.
As the youngest child in my family, I had a particular advantage: my older brothers and sister had already accumulated mountains of ddakji by the time I was old enough to play. I grew up surrounded by them, stacked in corners, stuffed into drawers. I don't even remember being taught how to fold one. Somehow, the process—layering two square pieces of paper into that satisfying, interlocked tile shape—became second nature through sheer exposure. This is how traditional games were passed on in Korean culture: not through formal instruction, but through proximity, imitation, and shared time.
When Squid Game opens its now-iconic Ddakji scene, the Salesman challenges Gi-hun on a smooth, polished subway station floor. It's cinematic, tense, atmospheric—and for older Koreans, immediately slightly off.
We never played Ddakji in subway stations. The reasons are several, and they reveal just how much Squid Game's version of the game is shaped by dramatic necessity rather than historical reality.
Seoul's Line 1, which opened on August 15, 1974, is often cited as Korea's first subway—but calling it a proper urban subway is a stretch. The section officially designated as "Line 1" was only the 7.8-kilometer underground stretch between Seoul Station and Cheongnyangni. The rest of the line was essentially a regional commuter rail network, connecting dormitory towns and military bases in northern Gyeonggi Province—places like Uijeongbu and Dongducheon—with central Seoul. Much of it ran above ground, not underground. It was, in spirit and function, closer to what we'd today call an intercity rail line: a lifeline for people arriving in Seoul from the provinces, not a network Seoulites hopped onto for a quick ride across town.
The subway that Seoul residents actually began using in daily life—the circular Line 2 connecting Gangnam, Hongdae, and the city's core neighborhoods—wasn't built until 1978 to 1984. This is the line that transformed how Seoul moved: frequent, underground, reaching the neighborhoods where people actually lived and worked. Today it carries an average of nearly two million passengers per day, more than all five other subway systems in Korea combined. Line 2 was the real beginning of subway culture as Seoulites know it.
All of this means that for children playing Ddakji, a subway station with smooth, polished floors was simply not a feature of daily life. Subway stations, in the modern sense, barely existed. And even after they did, they were not places where children gathered to play.
The real Ddakji arena was the narrow alleyway just outside the front gate of your home. That humble lane, with its slightly uneven pavement, the smell of neighbors cooking dinner drifting through open windows, and the sounds of an entire neighborhood going about its evening, was where most outdoor childhood games took place: Ddakji, 구슬치기 (marbles), 고무줄 (rubber-band jumping), 사방치기 (hopscotch). The alleyway was not just a location; it was a social ecosystem, and Ddakji was one of its defining rituals.
Squid Game portrays the Salesman's Ddakji as sleek, almost professional—color-coded red and blue tiles that seem almost factory-made. In real childhood Ddakji culture, the game was far more artisanal, and the material question was taken completely seriously.
Anyone who played Ddakji with real competitive intent knows the fundamental truth: the thicker and stiffer the paper, the harder your Ddakji is to flip—and the harder it can slap down onto an opponent's tile. This led every serious young player to the same obsessive question: where do I find the best paper?
The answer, universally, was the cardboard boxes from Korean holiday gift sets. During Chuseok (추석, the autumn harvest festival) and Seollal (설날, Lunar New Year), it was customary for families to bring large, elaborately packaged gift sets when visiting relatives—boxes filled with cooking oils, canned goods, spam, dried fish, nuts, or snacks. To the adults, the contents were what mattered. To us children, the boxes were the real treasure.
We would eagerly follow along on family visits, not only for the sweets and the pocket money from relatives, but with a strategic eye toward the empty boxes left behind. That thick, dense cardboard—the kind used in Chuseok gift packaging—made Ddakji tiles of exceptional quality. A Ddakji folded from that material had real weight behind it. It landed with authority. It dominated alley matches.
This meant there was a distinct seasonal rhythm to Ddakji supply. Right after Chuseok and Seollal, the best-stocked kids on the block were those whose families had received the most gift sets—or who had been clever enough to collect discarded boxes from neighbors. It was a small but real economy of cardboard.
From preschool through the early years of elementary school, Ddakji was nearly all-consuming as a pastime, alongside other traditional games like 공기 (gonggi, a Korean jacks-like game played with small stones). We played in the alley with complete seriousness and genuine stakes—when you won a Ddakji match, you took your opponent's tile. When you lost, you gave yours up.
This wagering element is something Squid Game does capture accurately. In the drama, the Salesman wins and takes money; if he loses, he gives money—and in the show's darker logic, this scales up into life-and-death stakes. In real childhood play, the currency was simply the Ddakji tiles themselves. Winning meant a growing stack. Losing meant handing over a piece of your collection. It sounds trivial now, but at the time, that stack of ddakji was a genuine source of pride. You counted them. You compared them. You sorted them by thickness and quality.
Having a large, high-quality collection felt like real accomplishment. These were, objectively, pieces of folded paper—what anyone today would simply recycle without a second thought. But they carried weight in the world of a child. They represented skill, persistence, and the accumulated proof of many hard-fought alley victories.
When Korean viewers of the Ddakji generation watched Squid Game, the reaction was rarely one of pure nostalgia. It was more complicated than that. Yes, the folded paper tiles, the slapping motion, the element of winning what your opponent stands to lose—these felt familiar. The emotional core of the game, the competitive energy, the sense that something genuinely matters in the outcome—that resonated.
But the staging felt foreign. The immaculate subway setting, the perfectly matched tiles, the lone one-on-one adult duel with a trench-coated stranger—none of that maps onto the experience of actually playing Ddakji. Real Ddakji was chaotic and communal. It happened in groups, with kids of different ages mixing together, some playing, some watching, some offering unsolicited advice. The youngest kids lost constantly to older, stronger players. The strongest player on the block was a kind of informal legend.
Squid Game distills Ddakji into something cinematic and symbolic—it works brilliantly as drama precisely because it strips the game down to its most primal element: you bet something, you either win or lose. But the texture of what Ddakji actually was—the cold pavement of the alley, the holiday gift box cardboard, the pyramid of collected tiles, the neighborhood kids with runny noses watching intently—none of that made it to the screen. It didn't need to, for the show's purposes. But for those who lived it, something is missing.
As years pass, these memories of Ddakji resurface now and then, reliably bringing a quiet smile. And with that smile, a realization that has sharpened with age: the ddakji itself was never the point.
It wasn't the paper. It wasn't the stack of tiles, counted proudly every evening. It wasn't even the victories. What was precious were the friends who played alongside—the shared laughter, the arguments over whether a flip counted, the collective excitement of a particularly dramatic match, the way an entire group of kids could become completely absorbed in something that cost nothing and required nothing except showing up.
Ddakji was the medium. The neighborhood was the stage. And the children—noisy, competitive, completely present in that alleyway—were what made it matter.
In an era dominated by screens and solitary digital entertainment, traditional Korean childhood games like Ddakji carry a quiet message: genuine connection requires only presence, not technology. It requires a patch of pavement, some folded paper, and other human beings willing to play.
Squid Game introduced Ddakji to hundreds of millions of people worldwide, and for that, there is something to be grateful for. But the version that went global is a dramatized, aestheticized echo of the real thing. The real Ddakji lived in the alley just outside your front gate, on a winter afternoon after school, with the smell of dinner cooking somewhere nearby and the sound of a tile hitting pavement echoing off the walls. That is the Ddakji worth remembering. Not because of the paper, but because of everything around it. Remembering Ddakji is remembering a time when happiness was simple, friendships were close, and even a discarded box could become a treasure. And that, perhaps, is why these memories never truly fade.