This article contains spoilers for Squid Game Season 3.
Squid Game Season 3 is here. The final game has been played, the winner declared, and nothing will ever be the same – at least until Netflix gets going with Squid Game: American Style. Regardless, you know what that means… We can finally rank all the games, baby!
Specifically, we’re going to rank the games not by how cool or deadly they are in the three seasons of the series, but by actual difficulty level. Because you may or may not have noticed, the thing that makes each of the games trickiest is that human nature gets in the way. Sure, strategy and sizing up your opponent is going to play in any game, from Monopoly to Football. But with plenty of fans inexplicably playing (hopefully) non-deadly versions of Squid Game at home or at Netflix pop-up experiences, some are naturally going to be easier than others.
With that in mind, let’s break down every game in Squid Game, ranked by level of real-world difficulty (and as a note, this was written before watching Season 3, Episode 6, so if there are any last second surprise games we’ll add in later).
Unranked: Special Game/Bathroom Fight/Revolt
There are several sequences in Squid Game that are part of the overall games, but would not be considered games, per say. For example, the “special game” in Season 1 when the lights go out and everyone tries to kill each other, or the bathroom fight in Season 2. Similarly, while the revolt towards the end of Season 2 is part of the mental chess game between Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae) and Hwang In-ho, aka The Front Man (Lee Byung-hun), it is also not actually a game. Imagine asking your friends “hey do you want to play special game” and then you turn out the lights and try to kill them? You’d likely not be invited back to parties, is all we’re saying.
15. Russian Roulette
As seen in Season 2, Episode 1, this is ranked towards the bottom because it isn’t a difficult game to play. The Squid Game twist here is that they only spin the chamber once, versus between every turn like a “normal” game of Russian Roulette. There’s no skill involved, it’s pure luck, and even less luck in this variation. You just pull a trigger and by turn six, one of the two players is dead. Deadly level? Pretty high. Difficulty level? Extremely low.
14. Bread and Lottery
Another simple game from Season 2, Episode 1, The Recruiter (Gong Yoo) approaches unhoused people in a park and offers a loaf of bread, or a lottery ticket. At the end of the “game” he stamps on all of the remaining bread. That’s it! As long as you know how to make a choice, you can play this game.
13. Sky Squid Game
The one original game in the series, this is introduced in Season 3, Episode 5, and uh… It’s utter nonsense. There are three large pillars: a square, a triangle, and a circle. The rules are that one person needs to get pushed off while still alive, and then everyone else can move on. However, if nobody has been pushed off in the allotted time, then everyone dies. To add to the game they have all the time they want to discuss, the timer doesn’t start until they press a button on the floor. And there’s a long metal pole in the center they can use to push people off.
There is some strategy here in the mix on the show because Gi-hun and Player 222, who is a baby (not a joke), are considered two different players. So the other folks would really like to push them off separately, on subsequent pillars. But in terms of playing this game in the real world there’s no real strategy other than poke someone with a pole until they fall down.
12. Hide and Seek
Introduced in Season 3, Episode 1, and played in Episode 2, the Squid Game version of Hide and Seek has a few variations. First, the seekers all have knives. Second, the hiders have keys they can use to open doors – with three different types of keys available (did you guess they were circle, triangle, and square keys? Because they are). The hiders get a head start, and can hide anywhere on the multi-level maze. They either need to escape or not get caught during the 30-minute game. Meanwhile, the seekers have 30-minutes to find the hiders and kill them. If they fail to kill anyone, they’ll be killed themselves.
Other than the knives, this is pretty similar to a game of hide and seek. And as it plays out in the show, there’s a lot of hiding, a lot of seeking, and occasionally some scuffling and stabbing… For the most part, once a seeker finds someone, they stab them and kill them and that’s the end of it.
To be fair, this whole thing is definitely skewed in the hiders direction, it’s much easier on their end, which is why this is ranked so relatively low. On the seekers end it’s a little more difficult. But only a little. They have knives, after all.
11. Marbles
As seen in Season 1, Episode 6, the Marbles game is wide open: two people play a game of marbles, whatever rules they want. Whoever takes the other’s marbles, wins. The loser dies (unless they’re an old man who is secretly running the game).
It’s hard to quantify this one on difficulty level mostly because it can be any marble game imaginable. But since some marbles games do involve skill (other than the instances where a player is aiming to throw the game to let the other player live) it’ll sit here towards but not at the bottom.
10. Jump Rope
A riff on Season 1’s iconic Glass Bridge (more on that in a bit), Season 3, Episode 3 introduces a thin bridge with a broken track in the middle, and a large, extremely solid “jump rope” that rotates past the bridge at an increasing rate. Meaning to cross, you need to run, jump, run, jump, until you get to the end.
This doesn’t seem that easy as it takes a lot of coordination on a thin bridge, but as we see on the show… Everyone, other than the baby and the baby’s mother (who broke her ankle) can complete the task pretty easily. The issue comes from a bunch of dudes who decide to throw people off the bridge. But otherwise despite how difficult this seems at first glance, it’s really only human nature that causes a problem here.
9. Tug-of-War
On the surface, there shouldn’t be much strategy involved in Tug of War. You pull. The other team pulls. One team wins. But as demonstrated by Oh Il-nam (O Yeong-su) in Season 1, Episode 4, there actually is a fair amount of nuance that comes in, based on the strengths and weaknesses of each team. In fact, despite having the “weaker” team, Gi-hun and company win by outthinking their opposition. There aren’t a lot of rules here other than “pull,” but if Squid Game convinced viewers of anything, it’s that Tug-of-War is a little more “war” than “tug.”
8. Red Light, Green Light
The first game played in the arena in both Season 1 and Season 2, Young-hee (that would be the massive doll who looms over the players) calls out green light, and everyone runs; and then red light, and everyone stops. If someone moves when she’s said red light, they die. It’s a simple physical test, but given how many generations of schoolyards have played this game where it does always end up with one winner, you probably already know this is more difficult to accomplish than it seems on the surface.
7. Mingle
First seen in Season 2, Episode 6, this is essentially a more complicated version of musical chairs… Of death!! The players are all spun around on a carousel, a number is called out, and then the players need to join in a group of that number and lock themselves in a room together. As the surviving players are whittled down, it becomes more difficult and more cutthroat.
There is a surprising amount of gamesmanship involved here, though there’s also manipulation from the gamesmaster in order to eliminate players and find a winner. Mind you, the way it’s executed in the show is mostly to create mass death to whittle down the number of players in the game. But even without the fear of getting shot, a lot of winning at Mingle involves making alliances on the fly, shifting those alliances, and figuring out what to do if you suddenly find someone else in the room you’re aiming for, with time running out.
6. Squid Game
The rules to the titular Squid Game are… Very complicated? One player is offense and can only hop on one foot outside the squid-shaped court. The other is defense and can move on both feet, inside the court. Then once offense has passed the neck of the squid, they try to get to the top of the squid and tap it with their foot, before they’re pushed out and “killed.” Or killed without the quotation marks in the case of the Season 1 finale.
Beyond keeping all the rules of Squid Game straight, there’s keeping an eye on your opponent, physical prowess, and psychology that play into Squid Game. It’s tricky, even if you are supposed to be able to casually play it on a schoolyard.
5. Ddakji
The game that started it all, the goal is take a square of paper, throw it at the other players square of paper on the ground, and make it flip over. That’s the long and the short of it, but while it is possible to do this, it is extremely hard to do – as seen in the first episode of the series, where Gi-hun loses approximately a million times in a row. To be clear, there are likely people this sort of thing is easy for; but for most of us, this is a task of precision and practice.
4. Rock Paper Scissors, Minus One
This amped up version of Rock Paper Scissors is also introduced in Season 2, Episode 1, and boy are there a lot of parts to it. You play the traditional game, but with both hands, and then both players pull away one of their hands. So there’s the psychological guessing game of your regular Rock Paper Scissors, times two: you have to try to figure out what your opponent is going to put out in the first round, and then what they’re going to pull away.
If that wasn’t complicated enough, the Recruiter adds that the loser needs to play traditional Russian Roulette (i.e., spinning the chamber). As we’ve established there’s no skill involved in playing Russian Roulette, but what this adds is time between rounds of Rock Paper Scissors. The only real way of beating someone at RPS is getting a sense of what they might do next based on what they think you will do next. These extra steps make the whole process more complicated, and far harder to win. Surprisingly complex!
3. Dalgona
Probably the most popular game to come out of Squid Game Season 1 and capture the imagination of the real world, the Dalgona candy game involves popping a shape out of the honeycomb candy intact. In the show if you break it, you die. In the real world if you break it, you lose. Some shapes are easy, for sure, but this is extremely tricky with more complicated shapes, as millions have realized since Season 1 dropped… And even tricky with some of the simple shapes, as well.
2. Six-Legged Pentathlon (mini-games: Ddakji, Biseokchigi, Gonggi, Paengi Chigi, Jegi)
The second “game” in Season 2 is actually five mini-games as well as a six-legged race. To quote BoJack Horseman: that’s too much, man! The games include Ddakji, which is hard on its own as we’ve already established. Then there’s Biseokchigi, aka Flying Stone, where you need to knock over a stone with another stone and if you miss, all six legs need to walk over and pick it up. Next up is Gong-gi, which involves throwing dice in the air in various combinations, ending with catching them on the back of your hand. Paengi Chigi, aka Spinning Top, is up next, and you have to wrap a cord around a top, throw it, spin it, and if you don’t once again everyone has to walk over and pick it up. And finally there’s Jegi, which involves bouncing a little paper wrapped around a coin in the air five times on your foot or ankle.
Any one of these would be – and is – difficult on its own. Together this is a near impossible and frustrating task that would turn from team building exercise to mass quitting on a company retreat.
1. Glass Bridge
Difficulty level? Impossible. As seen in Episode 7 of Season 1, the glass bridge features two paths of 18 glass tiles each. On one side, the glass is tempered and able to hold the weight of two people. On the other, it breaks instantly. And you don’t know which is which.
There’s an argument to be made here that like Russian Roulette, this is entirely chance. Except there’s a lot more to it. As we learn, Do Jung-soo (Lee Sang-hee) worked in a glass factory for years and was able to figure out which piece of glass was which, based on the refraction of light. Naturally, they turn off the lights… To which Do Jung-soo was able to test the glass by hitting it with a marble. Unfortunately, the folks behind him became impatient – there were only 16 minutes to cross – and threw him off the bridge.
So in fact, there are at least two ways to tell the difference between the breakable and non-breakable glass. You just need to have an intimate and life-long knowledge of how glass works. Barring that, though, there’s the psychological weight of second-guessing your choice based on what you think is going to break that will drive you quickly insane as you play. For that alone, this takes the number one spot. Just don’t jump on this ranking to test how fragile it is.
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