Seven Seasons of Korean Game Shows

I’ve written previously about how much Netflix’s The Devil’s Plan rocked my world. Since watching this phenomenal Korean intellectual game show, I’ve gone on a pilgrimage of watching other cerebral Korean game shows, and I’ve been loving it. The Genius, Crime Scene, Time Hotel… I’ve watched more than seven seasons of content and can’t get enough.

I’ll cover the seasons I’ve watched, starting with my weakest recommendation and working my way up to strongest.

  1. Crime Scene S1

By coincidence, I started watching Crime Scene only a day after Rabbit Hole Recreation Services, one of the most consistently great escape room venues in the US, announced it was launching a Jubensha parlor. As it ends up, Jubensha sounds a lot like the show Crime Scene. Players act out character roles in intensely complex role playing mystery games, navigating fully fleshed out crime scenes to search for clues.

Crime Scene failed to grip us. The early episodes dedicated about two hours per crime, with most of that time being dedicated to random unproductive speculation and goofing off. The first case hinged on a clue the cast never found and the viewers never saw. The last case we watched seemed to fix a bit of the formula by cutting the episode length in half, but by that point we had started to lose interest.

  1. The Genius S2

The Genius is largely heralded as the greatest of the cerebral gameshows, and it’s easy to understand why. Players take on marvelously complex games, primarily focusing on social gameplay but with memory, math, and other skill-based challenges along the way.

Season 2 was the weakest of the series for us, and we almost gave up midway through. The elimination games didn’t always feel fair, with the broader group in practice getting to vote out whomever they wanted for most of the early games. The games also had a runaway victor problem where winning early gave resources that could be spent for massive advantages in subsequent games. Thankfully the season ended on a strong note, and I’m glad we stuck with it.

  1. The Genius S1

The season credited for making the genre what it is today. I admit I wasn’t super impressed at first, starting with simple games, repeated games, eliminations that essentially amount to voting off players, and games almost entirely based on sharing information and taking an action accordingly.

Somewhere around the last handful of episodes, multiple legends were born. One for the show itself, with the games adding a layer of challenge and intricacy to bring them to a new level. One for Jinho Hong, who became a game show legend with some out of the box thinking.

  1. Time Hotel S1

Time Hotel aired in 2023, making it one of the newest shows we’ve watched. Players compete in strategic challenges to earn more time in the hotel – running out of time means checking out. To further complicate things, everything in the hotel including food and water costs time, so players needed to manage their resources well.

I loved the concept at the start, but as the game went on, the time currency seemed less and less meaningful – players for the most part were eliminated by losing in elimination games, not running out of time, and at one point producers even intervened and broke their own rules to refund a player enough time to make it through to the next challenge. Time was a valuable currency for buying advantages, but the fact that the currency was time didn’t seem to matter much – any kind of token would have worked just as well. The saving grace was that in spite of the guardrails, one player still ended up being eliminated by running out of time, and it was an incredibly dramatic moment. Overall a very good show that could benefit from a few modifications to the format.

  1. The Devil’s Plan S1

I’ve already written at length about how much I love The Devil’s Plan and why. The game-within-a-game mystery of the pieces is still perhaps my favorite story arc from any of the shows.

  1. The Genius S3

Season three of The Genius fixed everything I didn’t like about the earlier seasons. Death matches were now almost entirely one on one. Games had variety with enough wrinkles to create landscapes for players to come up with dynamic strategies that perhaps the designers didn’t even intend. The contestants for the most part seemed like powerhouses.

  1. The Genius S4

The final season of The Genius tied a nice bow on the whole series- bringing back nearly all of the most memorable contestants from the three previous seasons as well as a number of the more popular games from the shows. Every elimination was painful, since I enjoyed the full cast so much. The games felt well-balanced and fair. Since the players all had ample time to prepare and study the games, it elevated the level of strategy and execution seen on the show.

The shows are somewhat hard to locate now – generally speaking searching for “where to watch” each of them should give some direction. It’s worth it to hunt these down, though. For anyone who loves puzzles and lateral thinking, these Korean game shows are better than anything else out there.

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