Investment and Donation (Memory Maze)
Dongmin: You stabbed me in the front.
Ahyoung: Yes.
Dongmin, Hyunmin, Ahyoung and Yeonjoo are first to enter. Dongmin/Hyunmin try to patch things between them and Ahyoung/Yeonjoo who "betrayed" them last episode. Dongmin announces is that his goal today is to finish off either Dr. Yeonseung or Yuhyun. To this end he intends to lose main match and go to Deathmatch with power to select one of these two.
The main match is "Investment and Donation".
All players are given same amount of fake money. In each round players enter dealer's room one by one and give (or not) some money up for investment and/or donation. Player who invested the most money gets Top Investor badge. Player or players who donated the least get Miser badge. Top Investor badge overrides Miser. If there are several players who invested the same maximum amount of money, they get nothing while 1 player behind them in investments gets Top Investor badge.
Game played over 9 rounds. Player who received the most Investor badges wins, player who got the most Misers loses.
Dongmin gathers his team and plans out who is going to spend how much money on each turn. Dongmin wants to lose so initially he is not donating anything on the first 2 rounds. But to force Yeonseung and Yuhyun to donate more and funnel more of their money away from investing so that they could take more Top Investor badges they also need to raise minimum Donation price too instead of keeping 0$, so Dongmin donates some money and misses out on some Miser badges.
Yuhyun by that time has picked up on Dongmin's loss strategy and surmised him and Yeonseung can't win against 4-people alliance so he starts throwing the game too with the intention of at least gaining a choice of his Deathmatch opponent. They enter almost a race of sorts for who will collect the most Misers and loses the game.
Dongmin tries to pretend he IS playing the game for real and sends Yeonjoo as a mole to feed Yuhyun wrong information and later even tries to bribe Yuhyun so that he could stop and let Dongmin lose.
It all falls through, Yuhyun loses and Hyunmin is the winner leaving Dongmin, Ahyoung and Yeonjoo as candidates for Deathmatch. Yuhyun announces that he is not going to pick Dongmin for Deathmatch no matter what (both because Dongmin is fairly strong player and because him in the Deathmatch is exactly the outcome he wanted). Thus if Hyunmin gives token of life to either Ahyoung or Yeonjoo he will doom the other girl to Deathmatch. Hyunmin doesn't want to choose so he just gives token of life to Dongmin forcing Yuhyun to choose directly between Ahyoung or Yeonjoo.
Yuhyun chooses Ahyoung and they're playing Memory Maze. Player step on two corners of a big 7x7 board and have to reach destination on the other side of a board. Players take turns making three steps from cell to cell in cardinal directions. Player can opt use Double Chance once which allows them to do 6 steps in one turn.
The board has 32 imaginary walls placed between cells forming a maze. if player crosses that invisible wall, they hear a siren and have to go back to their initial position and wait for their next turn.
During Deathmatch Ahyoung gets confused forgetting which steps she took previously and Yuhyun distracts her talking to her confusing even more while himself making a steady progress towards the goal.
Yuhyun wins and Ahyoung is eliminated.
Tropes:
- Betrayal Insurance: Dongmin keeps demanding garnets from girls as a guarantee they won't betray them again.
- Death Seeker: Dongmin's strategy is to push Hyunmin for the win, while himself intentionally losing the main match.
- Good Cop/Bad Cop: Hyunmin plays this role softening Dongmin's occasional harsh words towards Ahyoung and Yeonjoo and securing their cooperation.
- Loose Lips: Yeonjoo reveals Dongmin's loss plan to Yuhyun.
- Sadistic Choice: because of Dongmin's failure to lose the main match, Yuhyun who lost instead says he will never pick Dongmin because that's precisely what he wants. So if Hyunmin gives token of life to either of the woman players, that will leave Dongmin (who Yuhyun won't pick) and the other girl that inevitably goes to Deathmatch. He then decides to give token of life to Dongmin and shifts the burden of choice to Yuhyun to pick between 2 remaining female players.
- Throwing the Fight: Dongmin idea of "perfect victory" is to give victory to Hyunmin and then protect his team by taking responsiblity and going to Deathmatch with power to pick his opponent. To his dismay, Yuhyun becomes aware of this strategy and starts to lose intentionally as well. Entire main match becomes a race to the bottom to become the biggest Miser. Yuhyun and Dongmin even start to haggle, promising each other garnets so that the other would stop and allow them to get losing spot.
