Alice in Borderland is a great anime and Netflix adaptation whose success lies in the games we see throughout the story, in how well the psychology of the players is represented, and the great amount of empathy it transmits to the viewer, so …What are the best Alice in Borderland games for me??
This article contains spoilers from the official Alice in Borderland manga., although the series on Netflix has finally caught up in 2023 with the final events of the manga. Although some adaptations vary slightly, most of the challenges proposed on Netflix are faithful to their original work and you can find them in this ranking of the best games that the world of Alice in Borderland presents to us.
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Alice in Borderland – The best games and tests
We currently know a total of 20 Alice in Borderland games. If I'm not mistaken, there are 2 that are exclusive to Netflix, and the rest have only been shown in the manga or are adaptations of a game shown in the original work. Of these 20 well-known games I will show a top 10 of what for me were the best test designs in this work by the Japanese mangaka Haro Aso.
Top 10 Alice in Borderland Games (Manga and Netflix Series)
Top Honorable Mention.- Survival (K of Spades)
The game Survival of the King of Spades It doesn't have any interesting rules or complex mechanics. All you have to do to complete it is kill the current King of Spades, Isao Shirabi, a former mercenary who was trapped in this world and completed all the games of his era until he became the King of Physical Trials. Like all figure games, it is all against one.
The most interesting detail of this game is the map, which covers the entire world except the places where you are playing another game. Thus players trapped in Borderlands declare it the most unfair game of all; Well, while you are not playing any game, you are participating in this one, and although you have an entire city to hide in, you are facing a professional mercenary with a submachine gun and sniper equipment.
Top Honorable Mention.- Croquet (Q of Hearts)
I also can't give the game a top 10 spot. Queen of Hearts Croquet, because I don't think it's one of the most elaborate or interesting Alice in Borderland games, but without a doubt its development was incredible, and it completely exceeded my expectations.
The main mechanics of this game It consists of talking to the Queen of Hearts, and you complete the game if at the end of talking to her she has not convinced you to commit suicide.. As simple as it may sound, it was the last game of all to be completed, and It took 7 days until someone made it out alive.. Furthermore, if you decided to face this challenge in any way other than talking, and by some chance you ended up murdering the Queen, the game could not be completed and all the players in the world would die when their visa expired.
Mira Kano, a prestigious psychiatric neuroscientist in the real world, and the Queen of Hearts in Borderlands, poured a certain drug into the tea to make the players who stopped to have a drink a little more suggestible, and with her glibness and relentlessness capacity for psychological manipulation managed to get them to take their own lives, taking advantage of the fact that no one really wanted to be in that world, where they suffered physically and psychologically almost every day.
Top 10.- Witch Hunt (10 of Hearts)
He 10 of Hearts It was the last of the unfigured Alice in Borderland games to be completed. Its setting was very original, and so were its rules. However, its development was not as interesting as it could have been. Still, I'm not saying it was a bad development, and it seems the most appropriate to continue with the story and the psychology of the characters.
All tests have a game scenario: in this case the La Playa hotel itself, where the best-organized Borderlands players were hiding, was the game scenario, and everyone who was there was immediately forced to participate. The idea of the game was investigate the murder of a girl, and burn the culprit who was hiding among them at the stake. Although the difficulty of this game was 5 Hearts if it had been played under normal conditions, Mira Kano changed its difficulty to 10 Hearts upon learning that the leader and an executive of La Playa had also been murdered moments before the game began.
After the leader and the executive expert in intelligence tests had been murdered, the militia and the experts in physical tests were left in charge of The Beach, and the game became a true massacre. The death of the girl who had to be investigated until the culprit was found had not been a murder, but a suicide, but due to all the chaos, no one realized until time was about to run out. It is known that 12 people survived out of the 66 who started the game.
Top 9.- Catch catch (5 of Spades)
He 5 of Spades is one of the first games we see in the Alice in Borderland series. Players were locked and unarmed in a building and had to find the correct room before the game ended, avoiding the two people with pistols and machine guns who wanted to kill them so they wouldn't win.
It's a really interesting game, where We know a couple of very relevant people for the course of history, They show us that all games have a strategy to be resolved (people with weapons were always hanging around the area of the winning room to keep an eye on it, and that was a very important clue), and they even allow themselves the luxury of leaving us with a bad taste in our mouths when it is revealed that the murderers in the building were also players forced to participate in the game, with the rules reversed: if any of the other players won, they lost.
Top 8.- Hide and Seek (7 of Hearts)
He 7 of Hearts, Hide and Seek, is the game that we find in the second or third chapter and that completely turns the player's expectations on their head. After having introduced us to what were going to be the four protagonists of the story, they take us to the first game of Hearts, where many times the game requires killing other companions to be completed. In this case it was not going to be different: Only one of all the players in this test can survive.
To win you need to be the wolf at the exact moment the test ends, and the rest of the players will be the sheep. If any sheep makes eye contact with you, they will steal your wolf title, and so on until the countdown ends. In this game of hide-and-seek between wolf and sheep, it is the wolf who must hide and flee from the flock, or they will end up robbing him of his chance to escape alive.
Furthermore, this game becomes even more interesting when the four protagonists realize that they have been best friends all their lives and it is not worth fighting to the death to see who survives. They decide that their friendship should prevail over the life and death that they were playing, so during the last minutes of the game the tables completely change and it is the sheep who begin to hide from the wolf, so that one of them survives even though he didn't want to be the one to get out alive.
The game quickly goes from being a 3v1 game where you have to hide to survive to being a 1v3 game where you have to find your friends to pass the baton to one of them and thus be able to give your life for theirs.
Top 7.- Fugitive (4 of Clubs (Manga))
He 4 of Clubs, also called Fugitive, is one of the Alice in Borderland games that is somewhat better thought out in the manga than in the Netflix series. It consists of being at the goal by the time the 50-minute countdown ends, or else you will not be able to complete the game alive. There are 6 players involved in this game, but one of them was the undercover King of Diamonds, because he wanted to see how people handled team games.
The location of the game is a 10km long tunnel, so anyone would think that they have to run 10km in 50 minutes to reach the finish line. In fact, everyone thinks that on the mobile phone that they are given at the beginning of the test they have a step meter to know the distance they have traveled, since everyone has the distance of 0 meters on their meter at the beginning of the game.
During the 50 minutes that the test lasts we see how the players suffer tirelessly as they run through the tunnel. In the manga version, they not only encounter a tiger, but they also have to pass an area full of crocodiles, another frozen area with negative temperatures, and then an explosion that sends the entire structure of the bridge flying into the air.
In the same way that happens in the Netflix chapter, It turns out that his cell phone was marking the distance to the goal from the beginning: 0 meters. They even had a bus with “meta” graffiti on it, but they were so nervous that no one noticed it. In addition, the test was of Clubs, which means that it does not require great physical effort or intelligence. Unlike what happens in the Netflix episode, all those who have managed to reach the end of the tunnel and travel the 10km end up dying in agony and suffering, completely destroying their psychological stability when they see that they had been fleeing non-stop from the goal, and that now all that awaited them was certain death.
It is a gloomy game that perfectly expresses what the world of Borderlands is., and since in the manga our protagonists do not participate in this test, no miracle is necessary for them to end up leaving alive. Simply those who gave their 100% to reach the end of the tunnel end up dying in an incredibly unjust manner, and only the King of Diamonds survives, who acted lame and stayed on the initial bus, and another girl who did not want to let him die alone.
Top 6.- Alien invasion (9 of Hearts)
He 9 of Hearts, Alien Invasion, is by far the most recent game of all, published in a spin-off of Alice in Borderland that came out last year 2020, if I'm not mistaken. It is a mini-story in which they tell you how our protagonist returns to Borderland for a brief period of time, but now he has a goal to fight for and strive to get out alive: his first child with the girl he met when they both met. They were trapped there.
Alien Invasion is also a very interesting game. You need to survive 6 rounds and spend all your cards to get out of there alive.
Tyou have seven cards: 1 with which you take away someone's possibility of passing the round, and another 6 with which you grant someone that same possibility. The funny thing is that in each round there is a person who has to die no matter what (except for one detail that is discovered at the end, but that is not what I find interesting about the game). So with that pressure of knowing that not all of you can be saved, you are forced to play this test by manipulating others at some point and walking on eggshells.
If you spend your card too soon to kill someone else, it may be that in the last round your opponent still has that card and then you would lose for sure. It can also happen that you spend all your saving cards very early to gain the trust of others and in the last rounds you have nothing left to offer them, to give two simple examples. In the end, this game of Hearts does not have an absolute strategy, and requires manipulating other players, deceiving and being cunning.
Top 5.- Life or Death (3 of Clubs (Netflix))
The first test that our protagonists face in both the anime and the manga is the 3 of Clubs, however, changes completely from one medium to another. In the manga it is much duller, and to survive they have to answer random questions, working as a team, as the clovers indicate.
On the other hand, the Netflix adaptation does not have as much to do with teamwork as it does with intelligence, so it should be a Diamonds test, because being a club test is very deceptive. Still, it is quite well thought out, and it gives you a perfect understanding of how the entire world of Borderlands works. In fact, its name itself describes the world itself, where you are playing life or death almost every day, and one bad decision can suddenly end your stay there.
I found the Netflix game very original, and it perfectly introduces the main idea of the series.; That's why it's ranked number 5.
At first it seems like a game of luck, where you always have a 50% chance of choosing the right door and surviving; However, as the protagonist tells us, it is not a game of luck (none is), nor a team game (although it would have to be since it is a test of Clubs), but rather it is a test of cunning, and to understand the space in which you are playing.
Top 4.- Blackjack (6 of Diamonds)
He 6 of Diamonds, with the name Blackjack is a somewhat peculiar game, a bit at the convenience of the script, because although it is assumed that no one could know the difficulty, nor the suit, nor the game itself before registrations closed, for this It proves that it is precisely intelligence and it is just about blackjack, 4 very intelligent people who are experts in blackjack meet. It is also the only known game that, despite not being Hearts, requires other participants to die before declaring a winner.
Leaving that aside, the game itself is very interesting: a poker game in which you bet chips and are hanged when you lose all. Besides you can cheat But if they catch you, whoever discovered you receives a gun with a bullet, to do with it whatever they want.
The game itself is a non-stop of traps and dirty tricks, from counting cards to playing sleight of hand by exchanging bad cards for good ones, to many other underworld poker strategies. In the end, the resolution of the game is very interesting and intelligent, and if its development is already good, the closure, as I say, gives it the finishing touch.
Top 3.- Beauty Contest (K of Diamonds)
In my top three Alice in Bordeland games is the Beauty Pageant, King of Diamonds. Despite its name, it is the definitive game to complete the Intelligence cards, and in fact the origin of this title comes from a famous mathematical experiment to analyze the economic behavior of human beings. The premise of this "Beauty Contest" is that To win you don't have to do what you think is best, but what the group believes is best., and the King of Diamonds participates along with four other people, who in this case also stand out for their incredible intellect.
I have a extensive analysis of this game on my blog, but I will still comment on it briefly because it is not wasted.
As all the players knew beforehand that this game is the King of Intelligence, It was to be expected that the smartest players who had survived Borderlands would show up. In this way, a game begins in which you must choose a number between 0 and 100, trying to predict the global average of the group always multiplied by 0.8.
As one of the players mentions, this test is on the verge of being more of a game of Hearts than a game of Diamonds, but instead of analyzing people's psychology, as happens in games of the other suit, in this one you must analyze the rationality of each of your adversaries. It would be a really boring game if it were played by perfect machines, but because these 5 super intelligent players are not machines at all, it becomes a test that requires incredible intelligence to pass.
Top 2.- Osmosis (K of Clubs)
The game of K of Clubs, Osmosis, has it all. The King of Clubs is a magnificent character, the approach to his game is unsurpassed and its development leaves no one indifferent.
The bases of the test itself are something as simple as the typical game of "Capture the Flag", which many of us have played when we were little, only with a few modifications: it is played 5v5, and each team has 10,000 points to distribute among its players as they wish before starting the game; Afterwards they will no longer be able to change that distribution. The rules during the game are as follows:
- Players on the opposing team do not know the points of anyone on your team unless you have contact.
- If there is contact with a rival, the player with the most points will steal 500 from the player on the opposing team.
- You can be in direct contact with your teammates to add your points in the meantime.
- If any player reaches 0 points they will die.
- The team that has the highest total of points after two hours wins.
- There are buttons hidden around the playing area that award permanent points. Between 500 and 3,000.
- Protecting your base is important because if an enemy manages to touch it, they will take 10,000 extra points.
- Someone who is touching their own base has infinite points, and if they touch someone on the enemy team they will die instantly, no matter how many points they have.
Osmosis is a game to work as a team, but in addition to that it is necessary to have a good strategy and distribution of points to be able to face rivals or at least not lose your life because of it, in addition to requiring good physical condition to be able to run, and a great psychological capacity to understand your rivals, their strategies and their way of facing the challenge. This simple game of King of Clubs requires a truly balanced team, as well as great coordination and trust between everyone.
Top 1.- Solitary Confinement (J of Hearts)
My favorite Alice in Borderlands game is Jack of Hearts Solitary Confinement, where none of the well-known characters in the story participate, but you meet a few other very interesting survivors. The idea of the game is also quite original, and along with the King of Diamonds game, it becomes the second known game to extend its duration beyond dawn.
20 people participate in this test, and They will have to be locked in a building with unlimited food and drink until they manage to defeat the Jack of Hearts, who is an imposter among the 20 players present in the building.. Violence is not allowed either, and Jack must be defeated in an original way:
All players have on their back a symbol from the poker deck (clubs, spades, diamonds or hearts) that all other players see except themselves (in short: everyone knows everyone else's symbols but no one knows their own symbol) . There is not a single thing in the building that reflects it, so you have to know your symbol every certain period of time or you will die. Furthermore, every time the time comes to communicate your symbol, it will change and another round will begin again.
Basically it is a game of trust and betrayal. You have to find a person you fully trust and a partner who fully trusts you or at any moment you could be sent to certain death. In this test it does not take long until different personal relationships are formed: some as pairs of companions, others as a group, and others as players who go it alone. As it is a game of Hearts and the players already knew it we can find many people who are experts in manipulation, as professional scammers, sect leaders, successful commercials, directors of large and influential companies either psychopaths perfectly integrated into society.
The idea of the game seems great to me. It's like a much more convoluted Among Us and before the game was even known. Furthermore, its development is incredible: The manipulation strategies used by each player are (I think) very faithful to human psychology, and you find very interesting resources and analysis by those who are clearly the leading voices in this test.
End of my Top Alice in Borderland games
You can leave a comment with your opinion, or highlighting any information that you think is incorrect or can be improved; I will be happy to read it.
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