Horror Race is a race among monsters: Vampire, Mummy, Gumiho, Jiangshi and a Zombie. They are competing on a board with 12 spaces.
Every player gets five coins, one per character. They pick two coins as bets on who will win the race. Remaining three coins are added to coin box.
Coin box (actual prop looks more like a sphere) is used to determine how characters move on a board. Each player pulls three random coins from the box and places them on any of the three areas marked as 1, 2 and 4.
Character that has the most coins in each area gets to move on that amount of spaces forward. If there are exact same number of coins among several characters then the character with next-most coins moves.
Order of placing coins is determined by random lots. Order is crucial because last players have much more agency over the game than earlier players. To counter-balance it earlier players can forfeit their turn and then on the next round order is rotated so that they get to be last.
After characters' moves are determined, coins are returned to the box and a new round starts.
Game ends when any of the Horror Race characters crosses the finish line. Character(s) closest to the finish line at that moment are considered 2nd place and character(s) further on are 3rd place. 1st place character nets you 3 garnets, 2 garnets for 2nd place and 1 garnet for 3rd.
Yuhyun, Jinho, Yohwan, Junseok and Kyunghoon form a team. They all drew numbers from 5 to 8 and Yohwan is 1 which makes his turns largely irrelevant but also puts him in a good position to surrender his coins earlier than everyone else and become last on the next round.
Yeonseung, Jungmoon, Hyunmin, Sangmin, Kyungran and Dongmin are in the other camp. Kyungran and Dongmin are 11 and 12 respectively which makes their turns extremely important because they can basically decide the outcome if they do set up right and have enough coins left.
Method for filling coin box makes building cohesive alliance very hard because if too many people pick the same monsters there will be less coins left to push these monsters forward. Dongmin's team has way too many people who picked Gumiho and Vampire and these characters are now dead in the water because there too few coins for these monsters.
Joint win in such a big team is almost impossible. Dongmin consents to at least pushing one of their teammates to the win. Because this is a Garnet Match where victory is determined by garnets, they decide to push Mummy for Sangmin because he has the most garnets: 3 against everyone else's 2 (having betrayed all of them just last week for that extra garnet).
Jinho's team isn't much better — they have Kyunghoon and Yohwan who both have just 1 garnet and are at the most risk of going to the Deathmatch. What's worse — they picked completely different monsters which means one of them will likely gain more points than the other which dooms one of them to Deathmatch. Yuhyun hopes that they can put several monsters on the same 2nd or 3rd spot and thus hopefully equalize the difference in garnet counts.
Lawyer Yoonsun who previously was isolated from both teams at one moment becomes the swing vote. She listens to both team's offers. Kyungran and Dongmin think she has a jiangshi. Dongmin tells she should put the jiangshi coin on 4 to advance them. She does that. But then in later turns Dongmin and Kyungran neutralize stack of jiangshi with stack of another monster, which puts forward a Mummy with next-most coins.
In actuality, Yoonsun bet on a mummy and was just as interested in mummy win as them. She saw through Dongmin's deception and let herself be "persuaded" while actually directly advancing herself.
Race ends with Mummy crossing the finish line. Yoonsun and Sangmin win 3 garnets but he had more garnets beforehand so he wins the game. Sangmin gives token of life to his teammate Kyungran. Yohwan didn't win anything so he goes to Deathmatch. He picks Yeonseung as his opponent.
They must choose their deathmatch game. Yohwan vetoes games with high variability, while Yeonseung removes card games because Yohwan is a professional poker player.
They will be playing Tactical Yutnori with partners. Yohwan picks his old frienemy Jinho as a partner and Yeonseung takes Dongmin. Dr. Yeonseung did his research and notes that Jinho always bases his Yutnori tactics around opponent's potential worst move so Dongmin uses this hint and "reads" both Starcraft pro-gamers like an open book and pushes Yeonseung to the win, eliminating Yohwan.
Tropes:
- Asian Fox Spirit: Gumiho is Korean variation of the same monster.
- Chinese Vampire: jiangshi, chinese hopping vampire is one of the characters in Horror Race
- Fixing the Game: 2 of the coins are slightly smaller than others. Producers also put different metal cores inside them hoping that players will be able to use magnets in their nametags to further differentiate coins without looking, but nobody figures it out. However, Dongmin has very sensitive hands and is able to differentiate coins by weight but that doesn't play a big role because he gets to pick coins last and by that time there are very few coins left in the box for him to choose from.
- Chekhov's Skill: Dongmin's ability to sense the smallest difference in coins' weights.
