The whole game in one page.
How to play
The dive
You go down one layer at a time on a single breath. Deeper means more. At some layer the breath runs out and you lose everything in your hands. Surface whenever you like and what you carried up is yours. Five dives a day.
Two words for the two halves of that sentence. The breath you take underwater when you cannot hold it any longer is mulsum — the breath you do not come back from. The whistle you let out when you do come back is sumbisori.
Nothing in this game tells you the next layers are safe. No card, no sound, no animation says it. All you are told is how deep you are.
Odds are fixed when the board is built and are never changed after your result is known. The server decides.
In hand, and in the net
What you have just picked up is in hand — lose the breath and it is gone. What you carried to the surface goes into the mangsari, the net bag slung under your float, the tewak. What is in the mangsari cannot be lost. Tap the net on the home screen and you see every piece in it, one by one, as many as you actually have.
The small ones stay
Every species has a minimum size. Below it, it is a jan-geot — a small one — and it does not go in the net. This is not our rule: haenyeo villages set their own minimum sizes each year in their hyangyak, the village's written rules.
You can scatter small ones in Halmang Badang, the shallow sea kept for the oldest divers. You get nothing for it. The sea just gets brighter there.
Three tiers
Haenyeo are grouped by skill into hagun, junggun and sanggun. It is not a title anyone awards. In this game your dives over thirty days borrow those words — measured against yesterday's you, never against another player.
| Tier | What opens |
|---|---|
| hagun | the shallow badang |
| junggun | deeper water · the spear (jaksal) · more fish |
| sanggun | the deep places · the widest range of fish |
No rankings
There is no leaderboard and no comparison with other players. Haenyeo call a big haul meojeong — the day's luck, not skill. Ranking luck would be calling it skill.
The village board shows how many divers of each tier went into the water today. It has no names, no places, no first. It is a count, nothing more.
Selling, and the household
The catch goes to the market and becomes household money. That buys things for the house — dishes, a rice cooker, a wetsuit, eventually a roof, a field, a truck. What you buy stays yours; sell it back and exactly what you paid comes back. Prices in the game are rough, not real market rates.
Giving
You can give a catch to Hakgyo Badang — the sea whose whole catch, on Jeju, actually built the village school. Give it and it leaves your record. Nothing comes back.
Go to the sea →