A while ago I was talking to my friend about learning how to play stop go. She told me that she’d found her cards  (called hwa tu) and that whenever we both get a free day, we’d try it.  Flash forward to today and we were ready to go. I even stopped and bought some mandu and mokgoli. She made fried tofu (grilled tofu?) and kimchi pancakes. We were going for authentic, okay?

*that’s not milk, that’s makgeoli*

I should have known there were going to be issues when I walked into her house and she was on the phone with her mom getting directions on how to play. Mom ended the call with “don’t you girls start gambling”. We assured her that it was not going to happen because we didn’t know how to play.  She set up the cards and we were ready (we thought).

Let me stop my story by saying min hwa tu is not go – stop. It’s like the beginners version. I thought that surely we would be able to master this game no problem because we were both intelligent women. How wrong was I? LOL. It took another phone call to mom, my friend’s sister, a visit to google AND youtube before we finally were able to play correctly. And quite honestly I don’t know if we did everything right.
When we were playing wrong, I won. Once we figured everything out, I lost terribly. Didn’t even matter who dealt the cards (shuffling those little things are hard!).  But it was a lot of fun. If you were interested in learning how to play, I strongly suggest you go HERE. They have the best explanation in layman’s terms that we were able to find.  I want to play again… maybe I should buy my own set so I can try to half ass teach someone else how to play.  I also need to play my friend again because I lost so badly *sigh*

Next time I am winning for sure.

you need to take notes when learning how to play