The Devil's Plan () is a South Korean reality game show. The first season premiered on September 26, 2023, on Netflix. Twelve contestants compete in both collaborative and competitive strategy games in order to win a cash prize.
Format
Twelve celebrity contestants are initially given one "Piece". A player with no Pieces is eliminated; Pieces can be traded between players or spent on in-game benefits. Pieces can be won and lost in the two daily matches: the Main Match and the Prize Match.
After the competitive Main Match, the two surviving players with the fewest Pieces are sent to prison until the next Main Match. The player or players with the most Pieces make tie-breaking decisions about who is sent to prison. The collaborative Prize Match determines whether a sum of money—₩50,000,000 or ₩100,000,000—is added to the final pot, which can total up to ₩500,000,000.
Games featured include social deduction games, board games, card games and abstract strategy games like nine men's morris. Main Matches typically see players forming alliances, while the Prize Matches test skills including memorization, numerical calculation and visualization.
Combining three different types of pieces forms an octahedron-like shape from which the clue "NEXT YEAR" can be read. Using this clue—by typing 2024 into a hidden safe in the prison—unlocks a variant of Gomoku in which the player must remember the colour of each piece.
Contestants
Most of the contestants are singers, actors or entertainers.
Episodes
Eliminations and numbers of pieces
Production
The program was produced by Jeong Jong-yeon, who has worked in the survival reality show genre before, such as on The Genius. He said that adjustments were made as the show progressed because the contestants' behavior was unpredictable. Runner-up ORBIT, who lacked competitiveness, played with an unusual strategy by collaborating to save players from elimination. Jeong said that it was not the direction he wanted the games to progress in but that it created a new narrative for the genre.
The first season concluded with Ha Seok-jin winning ₩250,000,000. Ha did not expect to win and was unfamiliar with the genre, but sought to prove that people in their 40s could still display intelligence. He came to understand why players were emotional at others' eliminations, as the cast were completely isolated from the outside world; he was upset at Si-won's elimination.