How The Devil's Plan Works: Pieces, Prison Matches and the Death Room

Seven days on a purpose-built set

The Devil's Plan (데블스 플랜) is made by producer Jung Jong-yeon (정종연), whose earlier shows include The Genius, The Great Escape and Girls' High School Mystery Class, and it was his first Netflix original.⁵² He made it after moving to TEO, the production company of producer Kim Tae-ho (김태호).⁶ Twelve players from different professions live together for seven days, cut off from the outside world, and compete in games for a prize of up to ₩500 million.⁷²

Jung said living in for a whole week was the biggest change from his earlier shows: shutting out daily life kept the players immersed, and every conversation could be filmed and stitched into the story.⁵ Rather than renting a building and adding cameras, the crew built a studio of more than 600 pyeong (about 2,000 m²) from the floor up so the cameras could be hidden, which took about two and a half months. It has two halves: hotel-like living quarters and an imposing game hall. Players had no phones, Wi-Fi or laptops for the week.⁵

Netflix released Season 1's 12 episodes over three weeks from September 26, 2023, and Season 2's 12 episodes over three weeks from May 6, 2025: four, then five, then three.¹⁸

Pieces: money and lives

Every player starts with one Piece. Pieces are won and lost in the day's matches, and can be traded between players or spent on advantages in the game. A player with no Pieces left is eliminated on the spot, and the two players with the most Pieces at the end meet in a best-of-three final of one-on-one games.¹ Season 1 player Kwak Joon-bin (곽준빈) summed it up at the launch: the main match is where you earn Pieces, and the prize match is where you earn money.⁵

Jung said the main matches are competitive and the prize matches cooperative: the prize only grows if everyone works together.⁵ In Season 1 each successful prize match added ₩50 million or ₩100 million to the pot, and the matches tested memory, calculation and visualisation.¹ In Season 2 the pot instead grew with goals scored during the main matches.¹ Players may not agree to share the prize: Jung said the contestants' contracts forbid it.²

Prison and the secret chamber

In Season 1, after each main match the two surviving players with the fewest Pieces were sent to prison until the next main match. On a tie, the players with the most Pieces chose who went.¹ ORBIT (궤도), a science YouTuber who finished runner-up, said at the launch that the prison was what set the show apart from other survival shows, and hinted at a hidden space.⁵³

That space was a safe in the prison with a four-digit code. Fitting three different Pieces together into an octahedron revealed the clue "Next Year", and Ha Seok-jin (하석진) entered 2024. Inside was Blind Gomoku, played with face-down tiles the player has to remember. Lee Si-won (이시원) tried it first, lost all her Pieces and was eliminated; Ha completed it the next morning and won 10 Pieces.¹ Jung said working out the secret of the Pieces was one of the moments that switched on Ha's will to win.²

No death match, and ORBIT's plan

Season 1 had no death match, the last-chance duel among the lowest-ranked players that Jung built into The Genius. He said he thinks it's a good format, but that its rules are the core intellectual property of The Genius, and using them would have made the new show too similar.² Not every main match eliminated someone, and Day 6 eliminated four players at once.¹

ORBIT used that gap.⁹ Rather than playing to win alone, he formed a majority alliance that helped players at risk survive. Jung said he hadn't expected anyone to steer the game that way and it wasn't the direction he wanted, but it was a storyline no survival show had seen.³² In his view the only game it distorted was Zoo, where his plan sent players to prison who didn't need to go and left joint winners with few Pieces; afterwards ORBIT rethought his plan and the alliance split.² Ha, who won by beating ORBIT in the final, said he hadn't expected to win while filming.³¹⁰

Season 2: the Death Room

The Devil's Plan: Death Room (데블스 플랜: 데스룸) kept the Pieces but split the players in half. After each main match, the half with more Pieces sleeps in the living quarters and the other half goes to the prison ward, where they play a prison match in the Death Room that eliminates a player.¹¹¹ Jung said the change looks simple but altered the colour of the whole season, and that the prison ward has a hierarchy among players who are both comrades and rivals.¹¹

The cast grew from 12 to 14. Jung said simulations showed that with one player out every day, there wouldn't be enough players left for the later games.¹¹⁸ The set grew to about 1.8 times Season 1's size, with a game hall styled as an abandoned medieval monastery, kept free of strong religious overtones, because he sees survival games as something pre-modern.⁹ Both buildings hid a secret chamber. In the living quarters it was a Knight's Tour puzzle, and in the prison it was a key at the bottom of a well that slowly filled with water.¹

Who plays, and who makes the games

For Season 1, Jung wanted people who had never been through a competitive survival show and could grow and change in one, and who somehow looked like they might win.⁵ Ten were well-known names, among them Ha Seok-jin, SEVENTEEN's Seungkwan (승관), presenter Park Kyung-lim (박경림) and Lee Si-won. Two came through an open call: orthopaedic surgeon Seo Yu-min (서유민) and student poker player Kim Dong-jae (김동재).⁵ The producers interviewed more than 300 people who had passed a written test before choosing them.²

Four of Season 2's 14 players were chosen from applications.⁹ Some beat more than 1,000 other applicants.⁸ Jung said he approached Go champion Lee Sedol (이세돌) because he came to mind as the player people would be most curious about, someone who seems to wait for a big contest; Lee said the show was harder than Go.⁸¹² The cast also included idols Kyuhyun (규현) of Super Junior and Chuu (츄), actors Yoon So-hee (윤소희) and Justin H. Min, and Jeong Hyun-gyu (정현규), a Seoul National University student.⁸¹³

The production team made all of Season 1's 20-plus games itself, testing them in-house and with hired testers. Jung said the constant worry is balance: too easy doesn't work, and neither does too hard.² Because players get no script, the crew also adjusts during filming.³ After Season 1 he said that, had he known it would find viewers around the world, he would have made it friendlier to them, for example by introducing the rules in English.¹⁴ For Season 2 he formed a game-development team for the first time, from an offline club of The Genius fans, and about half the season's games came from it. He also drops rules he thinks overseas viewers would struggle to follow.⁹

The scorecard

Season 1 reached No. 3 in Netflix's global Top 10 for non-English TV in its first week (September 25 – October 1, 2023: 2.3 million views, 10.0 million hours), then No. 6 the next week. In South Korea it spent four weeks in the TV Top 10 and reached No. 1 in the week ending October 8.¹⁵¹⁶ It made the Top 10 in 23 countries.⁹¹⁷ Ha took home ₩250 million.³¹⁰

Season 2 spent one week in the global list, at No. 9 (week ending May 11, 2025: 1.7 million views, 10.3 million hours). It spent three weeks in South Korea's Top 10, peaking at No. 3. It was No. 1 in Hong Kong and also made the Top 10 in Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand and Morocco.¹⁵¹⁶ Jeong Hyun-gyu beat Yoon So-hee in the final and won ₩380 million.⁴¹

Season 2's ending drew criticism from viewers, aimed at Jeong's remarks to other players and at moves by his allies Kyuhyun and Yoon in the closing episodes.¹³ Jeong said he took responsibility for the discomfort he had caused, and denied that the final had been handed to him.¹³¹⁸ Announcing Season 3 on September 2, 2025, Jung said the show had many supporters but had also drawn "quite some backlash", and that there were still stories left to tell.¹⁷⁶

Season 3: Dead Again

Season 3, The Devil's Plan: Dead Again (데블스 플랜: 데드 어게인), premieres on Tuesday, November 10, 2026, with 14 episodes released over three weeks. Jung directs with Choi Yun-hee (최윤희). Netflix says the title refers to players who have already "died", meaning been eliminated, in a survival show and are back for another try.¹⁹ At 16, its cast is the series' largest.²⁰

Season 1 winner Ha Seok-jin, Season 2 winner Jeong Hyun-gyu and Season 1 player Kim Dong-jae return. They face survival-show veterans: Jang Dong-min (장동민), who won five in a row including The Genius: Black Garnet and Society Game 2; Hong Jin-ho (홍진호), winner of The Genius: Rules of the Game; and Oh Hyun-min (오현민).²¹²⁰ The rest of the cast includes Shindong (신동) of Super Junior, known from The Great Escape; John Park (존박), winner of The Time Hotel; Jaejae (재재) of Girls' High School Mystery Class; rapper Nucksal (넉살); and singer-songwriter Stella Jang (스텔라장).¹⁹²¹ Jung called it "the strongest cast in the franchise's history".²¹