Who taught : Pat and Alex

Korean ladder game (source: Daniel's facebook)

How many times have you had to decide who is going to do what in your life? So many times, right? For example, who will be making a presentation for your team project? There is a great solution for this!

Let me introduce one of the greatest games you can enjoy to decide who will be “it.” It is called the ladder game. In Korea, people play this game to decide who is going to pay how much for food or snack. Especially, when it is summer, people in offices play this game to decide who will pay for ice creams and who will go and get the ice creams.

Here is the rule.

Preconditions : There has to be multiple people. The more, the better. And, people should agree to pay money or do anything came out of the game. There is no way back.

1. Grab a paper. It should be big enough to draw bunch of lines.

2. Draw vertical lines as many as players. (The lines should be quite long enough to be able to enjoy the game.)

3. At the top of the lines, put numbers, starting from 1, of course.

4. At the bottom of the lines, put different amount of money that the players should pay. (Here, you can also select one line as an indicator for a delivery guy.)

5. Now, you draw bunch of horizontal lines randomly here and there, connecting the vertical lines. (The most important thing here is you should draw a lot to make the game really interesting and make it hard to find out what number will end up landing in what amount.)

6. Cover the whole drawings and players randomly choose numbers corresponding to the numbers written at the top.

7. Now, number by number, we follow the lines from the top to the bottom to find out who is paying how much and who is doing the delivery.

It is really really popular in Korea and I can guarantee that it is really fun to play. People are so excited about it. I think this is the game that exists only in Korea but not sure. Can anyone from other countries tell me if you have this or a similar game?

Today, I went to Denny and Patrick’s farewell party. It was their last day at the company that I used to work. It was great seeing all of my friends again. After the party, I went into the office to help Pat out to move his box over to his car. As we started to walk out of the office, holding the box, he suddenly said, “All right! The last day! Let’s boogie!” I did not get it. So, I said, “Hey! What did you say? Boogie?” Alex said, “Terry! You do not know what that is?”

From the context, it sounded like, “Let’s get out of here!” Well, I was right. Boogie is originally a type of music and it became to the word people use when they dance to Boogie music. Then, for some reason, people decided to use this word to mean walking. Not sure how it became to mean this. Does anyone know?

But, it sounds very interesting and kind of pleasant. So, next time, try to say “Let’s boogie!” instead of saying “Let’s go!”