I stumbled across The Devil’s Plan on Netflx via the thumbnail depicting someone solving a tangram puzzle. That was enough for me to give it a shot, and boy did it surpass my expectations. The Korean game show has definitively captured my #1 spot in all of reality / game show history.
So what is it? On paper, The Devil’s Plan sounds a lot like any other game show you’d expect to see. Players compete in challenges to earn “pieces,” with players getting kicked off when their piece counts are reduced to zero. Players compete in strategic games to earn or lose pieces depending on their performance.
You might ask why, with such a traditional setup, this show stands out so much. The short answer is that this show is the single best depiction of intelligence I’ve ever seen on television. People define intelligence in many different ways. I personally define it as a person’s capacity to process information, problem solve, and create novel strategies. It’s not about where you have a degree from, or what you studied, or what your interests are. It’s not even about attributes like memory or knowledge. I think of it more like the impossible brain teaser questions tech companies famously used to ask applicants, like “How would you go about moving a mountain 100 miles?”
That brings me back to the show itself. The Devil’s Plan provides a fertile playground through showcasing real intelligence by giving players quite complex and convoluted “games” to play. None of the games are anything any of the players ever studied. The first game is similar to the party game “Mafia” but after that, the challenges become more abstract and we get to see how a very clever group reacts to unorthodox challenges.
Many of the shows challenges could be perceived as unfair, yet the contestants are never daunted. The players only have a short time to react to learning pages and pages of rules that dictate whether they’ll stay on the show. Not every contestant fully grasps the rules, but others provide guidance and protection in return for loyalty.
Spoilers from this point forward:
Perhaps the most engaging arc for me was watching Seok-jin and See-won playing a game within a game, putting together a secret password to a secret keypad that only a few players knew about. While most players were focused on the face value game, others played a more dangerous game to uncover the show’s deepest mysteries.
My favorite single move on the show may have been Seok-jin’s attempt at the unfair blind five-in-a-row game. Beating a computer at five-in-a-row could be a challenge with the board face up, and it becomes dangerously close to impossible when you have to memorize the positions of your and your opponent’s pieces. Seok-jin started the game putting down a red-bottomed piece and was at first alarmed when his opponent also put down red. The board started getting more and more complex, and Seok-jin stuck to red pieces, with the opponent following suit every time. Then, Seok-jin tested something new- he put down a yellow piece to make a 4 in a row. Predictably, the opponent blocked it, also with yellow. But now, Seok-jin had a visual indicator of which piece was his vs. his opponent’s. The outer yellow was the opponents, and the inner yellow was his. Even watching on TV, I was able to use that trick to follow which piece was which, and Seok-Jin pulled off the unlikely victory against an unfair situation.
The final two contenders showed off intelligence like that throughout the show. For nearly every game, ORBIT quickly dissected the mechanics and rallied the game’s weaker players to a strategy unlikely to result in them leaving the game. Challenges that seemed guaranteed to bump three players off the show often only caught one or two due to ORBIT’s ability to almost instantly break down game mechanisms.
The finale had another great depiction of intelligence. Faced with having to memorize a list of 19 numbers, then calculate sums of sets of three of them based on memory, both finalists quickly came up with approaches to maximize their winnings. Watching Big Bang Theory or BBC’s Sherlock, you might imagine the “geniuses” would commit the full grid to memory, but instead, both derived techniques that people following at home could attempt. ORBIT memorized each line independently, keeping in mind two 3 digit numbers, two 4 digit numbers, and one 5 digit number to reconstruct the grid in his mind. Seok-Jin at first tried memorizing the full board through remembering numbers in “C” shapes, but when this approach wasn’t working well for him, he realized he could memorize a good portion of the board by remembering only three 5 digit numbers.
End Spoilers
Creative thinking like this is what I like about escape rooms- players are thrust into situations with no playbook and have to identify a path forward. In an era of increased automation and simplicity, where mental skill is outsourced through Google or ChatGPT, it’s tremendously refreshing to watch an ode to creative thinking and watching people solve daunting mental challenges.
I cannot wait for season two of The Devil’s Plan. It’s not a show to watch while multitasking (even if you speak Korean) – the intricacies of the games are so fascinating and it’s extremely fun to think about what approaches you might take if faced with the same challenges.
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