Series / The Devil's Plan

The Devil's Plan is a South Korean reality show produced by Netflix that would best be described as a week long competition for smart people, by smart people.

The format is this: twelve contestants, most of which are celebrities and all known for intellectual pursuits, play various games in which their results cause them to gain or lose the show's currency, Pieces. These games test player's strategy and intelligence and include abstract strategy games, social deduction games, logic puzzles, variations on board and card games, and other similar challenges. These matches are broken into two categories: a main match, which is a competitive game where Pieces are primarily won or lost, and a prize match, a cooperative game where money is added to a pot that serves as prize money for the winner. Any time a player runs out of pieces, they are eliminated from the game. The last player two players remaining in the game play one final match, and the winner of that wins the competition and all accumulated prize money.

The first season debuted in September 2023, and a second season has been announced.

Tropes found in The Devil's Plan include

• Abstract Strategy Game: About half of the matches could count as one.
• All or Nothing: Applies to each prize match and the overall game. There's no partial credit on any prize matches, and only one player will walk away with any money in the end.
• Auction: The fourth main match, Zoo, uses this as its primary mechanic. Players bid on which of two animal combinations are placed onto the field. The combination with the lowest combined bid is the one actually placed, but the individual player with the highest bid on that combination decides it exact formation on the field.
• Awesomeness by Analysis: Seok-jin. Best exemplified in the process of finding the secret room. In addition to cracking the code, he recognizes what the game was just by seeing the table.
• Back for the Finale: All of the eliminated players return right before the final match and as spectators during it.
• Book Ends: Once all players return for the finale, they try to recreate their first meeting with each other, with everyone re-introducing themselves from the same seats they took when they arrived.
• Call-Back: During a discussion between Dong-jae and Joon-bin about who he's aligning with during Secret Numbers, the third main match, Joon-bin jokingly shares a bit of info: he's the Reporter, one of the roles from the Virus Game two days and four episodes before. The screen in the game even shows the same graphic for it.
• Caps Lock: Subtitles stylize ORBIT's name like this.
• Chekhov's Gun: The Pieces end up being a pretty big one. Pieces earned from different sources have notches in different places, and arranging them in a manner similar to a eight-sided die gives a clue to a password hidden in the prison.
  • Some of the players believed the board games stocked in living area were a hint towards later matches. They were correct - Four Player Three-In-A-Row is the last prize match, and Nine Men's Morris is one of the games played in the final match.
• Confession Cam: It exists, but the bulk of the confessions are at the very beginning, when a player is eliminated, or any situation where a player is working alone, opting instead to use conversations between players whenever possible.
• Creepy Cave: The prison is styled as one. It even has a Secret Underground Passage.
• Cunning People Play Poker: Dong-jae and Guillaume are both introduced as professional poker players, and Guillaume is better known as a pro Starcraft player. Both seem particularly good at the social aspect of the games.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: The first round of Word Tower was this, in part due to correctly anticipating the category given the letters they could see during setup. The team was given 10 minutes per round; this one was solved in just under 1!
• Death or Glory Attack: The hidden game, Blind Five-In-A-Row. 10 Pieces for a win, but lose all Pieces in a loss.
• Determinator: Equation Hi-Lo puts ORBIT in this position, fully expecting to be eliminated and eventually running down to their last chip before landing a series of wins and outlasting multiple players.
• Do Well, But Not Perfect: After each main match, the two players with the lowest Piece count are sent to prison. Once players realize Pieces can be won there through a metal cast puzzle and, later, a high-risk-high-reward match, there becomes value in trying to get sent to prison. Seok-jin exploits this on day 5 once he thinks he has the password to the safe determined.
• Eliminated from the Race: Any player who loses all their Pieces is eliminated from the game.
• Elimination Catchphrase: "[name] no longer has any Pieces left. [name] has become the [rank] eliminated player of the Devil's Plan. [name], return to the living area, pack your belongings, and please leave at once."
• Enter Solution Here: A hidden safe in the prison asks for a numerical code. Its solution was hidden in the Pieces - arranging them in a specific formation spells out a message explaining what to do with it.
• Euro Game: A few matches take elements from them, but probably the best example is Laying Grass, the fifth main match. It's a tile placement/area control game where players use polyominos to claim territory, with the overall goal of trying to form the largest square possible on their board.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus: Props and components from some of the individual matches are referenced somewhere in the title sequence.
• Game Show Host: His name and identity are never revealed, but presumably he's the Devil alluded to in the title. He never directly interacts with the contestants, but instead conducts the games through a video monitor. He's nearly always seen sitting on a recliner, wearing a hoodie and electronic mask highlighting menacing eyes and a Slasher Smile, and speaking with a slight vocal distortion and echo.
• Gender-Equal Ensemble: Six men and six women.
• "Get Out of Jail Free" Card: The Rules Race has these, working pretty much the same way as Monopoly.
• Good Luck Charm: Dong-jae considers his sweater to be one.
• Good with Numbers: The third main match, Secret Numbers, makes it pretty clear who is and who isn't. ORBIT in particular seems on the high tier on this, as he ends up more or less taking the lead with a group of people and helping them with some of the highest scores in the match. On the other hand, Dong-jae is pointed out as one of the better mathematicians by other players after the fact, but ultimately ends up with the lowest score.
  • It's brought up again on the Scale Game, the fourth prize match, when players note that they unintentionally assigned one of their most math-brained people to each of the three teams: Seok-jin, Dong-joo, and ORBIT.
  • And it's highlighted one more time with Equation Hi-Lo, the sixth main match. Joon-bin claims not to be this, yet given their run at the table at Equation Hi-Lo, they clearly has some natural talent here - they're the only player shown winning a swing bet! In the other direction, Seok-jin is skilled enough to point out a better move for other players after the hand has ended.
• Luck-Based Mission: Being a roll-and-move board game, the second main match, Rules Race, is one of these, albeit with the ability to register a personal and a group rule to make it less luck-based.
• Manly Tears: Seok-jin does this, clearly overwhelmed with being successful at the hidden game when See-won was not. Also, Joon-bin also lets out a good cry after his play in Equation Hi-Lo eliminates one of his allies.
• Marathon Level: Equation Hi-Lo runs long enough that the last four contestants are at it for seven hours and 25 rounds, to the point that an Obvious Rule Patch is instituted just to make the game faster: players start revealing their bets and equations simultaneously instead of one at a time.
• Memory Match Minigame: The fifth prize match, Montage, is based on this. Instead of flipping tiles, portraits are shown in a sequence and players have to buzz in the first time there's a repeated picture.
• Once More, with Clarity: It's fairly common for a character to say or do something that reads as a jump in logic given what we're shown, then flash back to different scenes that happened before that showed how they were able to determine that.
• Only Known by Their Nickname: ORBIT.
• On the Next: Tends to show up at the end of each day of competition about as often as the end of actual episodes.
• Puzzle Thriller: The second main match, Rules Race, has shades of this. Before the game begins, each player secretly registers a personal rule with a condition and an action, and while the game is in progress, a group rule that applies to everyone can be registered by landing on specific spaces.
• Reality Has No Subtitles: The Rules Race word blocks are left untranslated for the audience. While the rules eventually chosen, invoked, and seriously considered are explained and described, viewers who can't read Korean won't be able to tell what was available in the first place.
• Reality TV Show Mansion: The contestants live in a set resembling one. It's divided into a living area and a game area, and at no point do the players leave it unless they're eliminated. We even see a brief time lapse of it being built in the show's opening minutes. Inverted by the prison - while still part of the same set, it's a single cell with the barest of amenities.
• Recognition Failure: Played with in the introduction. As contestants enter the mansion - many of which recognize each other - Yu-min challenges them to guess who she is. In actuality, she's one of the few non-celebrity contestants.
• Rules Spiel: Shows up on every single game. It's more detailed than most, usually lasting several minutes and including several edge cases that usually don't impact the outcome and contestants' reactions to the game.
• Screw the Rules, I Have Money!: Some games allow players to spend a Piece for advantages. Overlaps a bit with Cast from Hit Points, since running out of Pieces will eliminate a player.
  • A group rule in Rules Race allows players to spend these to take an extra turn.
  • In Secret Number, they could spend these to get an extra set of math operation tickets.
  • In Laying Grass, they could spend a Piece to buy another tile exchange coupon, to buy single 1x1 grass tiles, or to remove a stone tile.
• Secret Level: The Secret Underground Passage in the prison leads to one of these, a match of Blind Five In A Row. Unusual in that it's the only "single player vs. AI" game and it's a high stakes game - winning gives the player 10 Pieces, losing eliminates them from the whole competition.
• Shout-Out:
  • In Fragments of Memory, one detail noted in the picture was that Squid Game was on TV. As both shows are Korean Netflix originals, this also counts as a Company Cross Reference.
  • Just before starting Secret Numbers, Seok-jin is compared to his role in Problematic Men, suggesting he unintentionally looked the part. It's referenced again during Laying Glass as a joke as to why he keeps getting problematic tiles.
• Slasher Smile: A feature of the host.
• Sleep Deprivation: In an attempt to hide information they expect will be important from the rest of the players, Seok-jin and See-won are up all night after day 3-into-4, after noticing there were three different designs for the Pieces they've been accumulating. Later, See-won pulls an all-nighter trying to solve one of the prison metal cast puzzles.
• Sliding Scale of Cooperation vs. Competition: The prize matches are always cooperative, though frequently with Piece rewards for players who do exceptionally well. The main matches are an interesting mix - while just about all of them score and reward/penalize players individually, they're typically designed in such a way that some cooperation or coordination between players is encouraged.
  • On a more individual level, the final two players' overall philosophy towards the game is on opposite ends of this. Seok-jin tends to play more individually, while ORBIT frequently designs strategies that try to benefit as many players as possible.
• Smart People Play Chess: Or Go, in this case. One of the contestants, Yeon-woo Cho, is a professional Go player, and many of the games played are other Abstract Strategy Games.
• Social Deduction Game: The first main match, the Virus Game. It's closely related to Mafia and directly compared to it by a few players. Teams are separated into terrorists, citizens, and neutrals. The terrorists win if they can infect all players, the citizens win if they survive long enough, and the neutral players have their own objectives unrelated to those. These are even further broken down to specific sub-roles with abilities triggered by taking specific actions throughout the game area (for example, the Officer can kill another player by flipping a book in a particular room containing that player's ID number), and most players aren't aware of each others' roles or who has a similar role.
• The Strategist: With a game targeting intelligent people and professional gamers, a case could be made most players are this. ORBIT probably fits the archaetype most, as he frequently takes the lead in figuring out group strategies.
• The Summation: Around many pivotal moments in the match, we'll see flashbacks towards how the players were able to determine something.
• Theme Tune Extended: The theme song normally only plays for about 20 seconds, but an extended version pops up for the final episode.
• 12 Coins Puzzle: A variation of this is the fourth prize match, the Scale Game. They have five colored cubes of unknown weights and use a balance scale in order to correctly figure out how to rebalance the scale.
• The Unfought: Dice Poker is mentioned as the final game in the best-of-three match, but as the match was won 2-0, we never see it played.
• Viewers Are Geniuses: And so are the players.
• Wins by Doing Absolutely Nothing: Discussed. ORBIT proposes this during the Virus Game to ensure the citizens win, suggesting none of the players would be able to take any interactive actions that would allow the terrorists to infect anyone. It's rejected by the rest of the players in the end, and the announcer points out that it wouldn't work fast enough to give the intended result.
  • Played straight during the Cooperative Puzzle, where Dong-joo had made the final move in solving the puzzle, but Joon-bin got credited with the victory since the carousel moved just far enough to put them in front of the puzzle.
• Won the War, Lost the Peace: No one seemed happy with the results of Secret Numbers. The nature of the game forced players to team up with multiple people in order to figure out their numbers, but they could lose points if another player correctly deduced them. Confusion and miscommunication on who was working with or betrayed each other leaves everyone feeling down.