How I fell in love with 'baduk' and brought it to the classroom
I first encountered "baduk," a strategy board game known as "Go" in English, around three years ago while watching the Korean drama “Empress Ki.” I was intrigued by the way this board game was used as a metaphorical battlefield to show the pitfalls of an overly aggressive approach in both the game and the pursuit of power. One of the characters even gained the trust of his enemy by defeating him in a game of baduk. Seeing the respect for the game and its players inspired me to learn more about it.
As a British-Australian teacher living in London, I discovered that baduk has been the object of strategic gaming for thousands of years. From ancient China to Korea’s Joseon period, it was one of the four cultivated arts required of scholars. As I delved deeper into all things Korea as a “Koreaphile,” my Korean language teacher introduced me to an old proverb: “There are no meaningless stones on the baduk board.” This resonated with me because I think that much like in baduk, every move and the choice we make in life, contributes to our overall journey and we gain valuable lessons from all our experiences.
The “stones” in the proverb refer to the game’s coin-sized black and white pieces. Played on a 19 by 19 grid, baduk is a turn-based game in which players strategically place their stones to control more territory. I learned the basic rules via a smartphone app but quickly realized that the sheer volume of possibilities in baduk makes it a game that requires a profound understanding of strategy, deep foresight and the ability to navigate an unparalleled range of possible outcomes. By comparison, chess has many of these traits but its smaller board and more constrained rules make it easier for players to analyze and anticipate moves within a game.
As I took on online opponents via my phone, I gained an appreciation for the achievements of baduk master, Lee Se-dol, who was the subject of much global interest in 2016 when he competed against an artificial intelligence counterpart, AlphaGo. While Lee lost the series 4-1, he is the only person to have beaten AlphaGo in a game of baduk. Furthermore, his win demonstrated how humans’ strategic thinking could develop ways to beat even an advanced AI counterpart.
By the time I moved to Korea in August 2021 to teach at a foreign school in Seoul, I was very much a budding baduk fan. When I asked young students in my primary school class if they had ever heard of baduk, none of them had. I thought that was quite a shame because it is one of the oldest board games in the world and Korea has one of the highest rates of baduk players per capita in the world.
Education may have changed considerably since Joseon times, but the benefits of learning and playing this board game remain as relevant as ever — proponents insist it fosters strategic creativity, patience and discipline while forcing players to expand the way they think, solve problems and weigh up risks. I can see why that would be the case because baduk is not the sort of game where you can haphazardly place stones without thought. Hoping to have my own school’s students reap those rewards, I set about providing baduk classes as one of the many extracurricular activities (ECAs) they offered.
We started the baduk ECA last year and are now into our second consecutive academic year offering it to 7- to 11-year-old students from all over the world. Because I am teaching it in English, I’ve built the curriculum using materials provided by the British Go Association. We start every lesson by working together to solve different puzzles and it’s been excellent practice for their verbal reasoning and prediction skills. I have also found baduk to be great for teaching students to look beyond their next move and see the bigger picture, which is valuable in all areas of the curriculum.
Moreover, I have seen children who knew nothing about baduk become enthusiastic about the game, improving every week as they are excited to try out the new techniques that they’ve learned. As we have new students join the ECA each term, it is lovely to see the more experienced players help the newer students learn the rules. One student even told me that he’s played a few games of baduk with his grandfather.
Given how valuable my experience has been, I was saddened to learn about the possible closure of Korea’s only university department teaching baduk due to its waning popularity. I would like to see more educational institutions tap into how useful the game is as a teaching tool and as a skill in its own right.
Korea’s recent success in the Go competition at the Asian Games in Hangzhou, China, is a reminder of how vibrant the game still is — the men’s team won gold and the women took silver last October. This was only the second time Go was part of the Asian Games since debuting in 2010, but it sparked renewed interest in the game in Korea.
It’s great to see baduk players representing Korea pick up medals, and I would also love to see their success fuel more momentum in classrooms and society at large. If you’ve never sat at a baduk board before or downloaded a baduk app, you could join me in discovering a mind-expanding world that might just inspire you to unlock problems in innovative ways. I’m confident that you, your children and your family and friends will find it enormously enjoyable and stimulating.
Phoebe Rowbottom is a teacher at Dulwich College Seoul.