This article contains spoilers for the series finale of Squid Game.

After three seasons, 22 episodes, and so, so many deaths, Squid Game has finally played its last game – and declared a winner, as Season 3 comes to a close on Netflix.

…Or has it? Show creator Hwang Dong-hyuk has already teased a potential spinoff taking place between Seasons 1 and 2. Earlier this week (June 25), Front Man actor Lee Byung-hun teased even further that the finale may not tie things up with a bow, leaving the world of Squid Game more open than you might expect. And in fact, that’s exactly what happened in the finale as we move the action from South Korea to Los Angeles, featuring a shocking, surprise A-list cameo. Squid Game has gone Hollywood, baby, and Cate Blanchett herself is recruiting the players!

There’s a lot more to delve into there, and we will. But first, let’s give a recap of what went down in the finale, for context. Leading into the final episode, the game was down to two – well, technically three – players: Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-Jae), aka Player 456; Lee Myung-gi (Im Si-wan), aka the crypto-scamming YouTuber Player 333; and Myung-gi and Kim Jun-hee’s (Jo Yu-ri) baby, who has been rechristened Player 222.

Meanwhile, rogue guard Kang No-eul (Park Gyo-young) had left a dead body in the Front Man’s office while trying to find info on Park Gyeong-seok (Lee Jin-wook), aka Player 246, whom she had helped escape. Gyeong-seok was almost killed on the water, only to be saved by police officer Hwang Jun-ho (Wi Ha-joon), who was almost killed himself but is now within reach of the Game’s secret island, the thing he’s been searching for since Season 2. And also, unfortunately for everyone, including the viewing audience at home, the billionaire VIPs are back.

That’s a lot to juggle going into the final hour, but it wouldn’t be Squid Game without chaos. So here’s how it all turned out in the finale, “Humans Are…”

Squid Game Season 3 Ending Explained

Without getting too lost in the rules of Sky Squid Game, the final game in the series, Gi-hun realizes that Myung-gi is likely going to kill the baby in order to claim the final prize money. So despite his oath to save everyone by reentering the game at the beginning of Season 2, Gi-hun instead ends up in a knife fight with the YouTuber. Myung-gi ends up falling to his death, so it’s down to Gi-hun and the baby – and only one of them can survive, or they both die.

There’s a moment where it seems Gi-hun might throw the baby off the pillar they’re on… But instead, he kisses the baby’s head, puts her down, and then looks directly at the camera – talking to the Front Man, but also us, the audience.

“We are not horses,” Gi-hun says. “We are humans. And humans are…”

Without finishing the sentence, Gi-hun falls backwards off the pillar, to his death.

While he dies, there are several other things going on. No-eul has set the records room on fire, but not before discovering that her child, the one she was trying to find, which led her to working for Squid Game, is dead. She almost kills herself, but stops when she sees Gi-hun’s sacrifice. Meanwhile, Jun-ho gets to the island and sees his brother, the Front Man, take the baby, and stops short of killing him. “In-ho!” he shouts. “Why? Why’d you do it?” But there’s no answer, and the Front Man has started a countdown sequence to blow up the island, as the Coast Guard approaches.

So, our surviving characters escape, and six months later, someone takes the stacks of money Gi-hun was hiding in his hotel room. Who is it? It’s not explicitly stated, but is likely the Front Man, or a rep of the Squid Game. Back at the carnival where she worked, No-eul visits with Gyeong-seok, whose daughter is recovering from cancer. And No-eul also gets a call that her daughter may be alive in China. She’s likely not, but No-eul has decided to hope and search, rather than move on with her life.

Oh, and after picking up his old cohorts at prison (who are going to take over Gi-hun’s hotel), Jun-ho gets home to find Baby 222, along with a note that she is the winner, and a gold card. When Jun-ho checks it at an ATM, he sees that it has 45,600,000,000 won.

What Are Humans: Breaking Down Squid Game’s Horse Metaphor

You get it, right? It’s not just the money: 456 won. Despite dying, the ideological challenge the Front Man put to Player 456 was proven false, as the latter sacrificed himself to save 222. The Squid Game continues, because as was established in Season 2, you can’t stop the game. It’s a metaphor for capitalism, and only by breaking the whole system of the entire world could Gi-hun ever hope to eliminate the Squid Game.

Instead, he won a personal, moral victory by letting himself fall to his death to preserve new life. You can see this in the Front Man’s interactions later on (more on those in a second); but there’s also the ominous, dangling question of what that money will do to Jun-ho, now that he has access to it, as well as how it will impact 222’s life going forward.

So what is the end of the sentence Gi-hun left us on? What are humans anyway, bro? The first thing to understand is that horses have been a pervasive metaphor throughout the series, from the literal horses on the carousel in Mingle to the horse mask worn in the club scene in Season 2. And if you’ll remember, when we first met Gi-hun he spent most of his money on horse races. In the finale of Season 1, the Front Man told Gi-hun that “You bet on horses. It’s the same here, but we bet on humans. You’re our horses.” Later on in that same episode, Gi-hun fired back, “Listen carefully. I'm not a horse. I'm a person.”

That sets up the “horse” part of Gi-hun’s final line, but what about the rest? The important part here is that Gi-hun is looking at us, the viewer. It’s likely that Hwang Dong-hyuk has a possibility, or possibilities in mind for what humans are. But it is up to us to fill in the blank there. No shade to horses, but the idea is that humans are unlimited. Are we compassionate? Greedy? Loving? Vain? All of that? The answer is yes, humans can be anything, and are so much more than horses running around a track. We have the capacity for anything, and that is how Gi-hun “wins,” by proving that he can break the cycle with his own sacrifice.

…But he hasn’t really broken the cycle, has he?

Squid Game Heads To Los Angeles, But Is This David Fincher’s Series?

In the final scenes, we cut to LA, and see the Front Man has come to where Seong Ga-yeong (Jo A-in) lives. That’s Gi-hun’s daughter, who left with her mother in Season 1, in case you forgot. She doesn’t want anything to do with her father, but the Front Man gives her a box with his “belongings,” which weirdly include the bloody 456 uniform, as well as a gold card. Of note, the Front Man clearly still sees things as capitalist exchanges, despite what Gi-hun taught him about horses versus people. Whether the money will change Ga-yeong, and also what she’ll do with the very clear evidence of a death game existing, is TBD.

But the bigger, dangling cliffhanger is that as the Front Man is driven through the city, he passes by an alleyway and hears the distinctive sounds of ddakji being played, followed by slaps. Sure enough, someone is in the alley playing the game that leads to Squid Game… And it’s not just “somebody,” it’s Cate Blanchett. She’s the recruiter and is playing with a bearded man, who is losing just like Gi-hun did all those many years ago.

Funnily enough, in Squid Game: The Conversation, a half-hour that follows the final episode, it turns out that not only did Lee Jung-Jae have no idea who the cameo was, but Byung-hun didn’t even get to meet her.

“Cate Blanchett, she’s one of my favorite actors, but I didn’t even get to say hello,” he says. “She and I shot that final scene separately, since it’s just the camera cutting back and forth between us. I couldn’t say hi because once we shot it, we had to go.”

They also add that Blanchett got ddakji in advance to practice, but according to Hwang Dong-hyuk, “She wasn’t able to try it out much before the shoot. She had to hit the other ddjaki and flip it, but she couldn’t get it. So I went over and gave her a quick lesson.”

Don’t worry, he adds, “the take we used, that was real… The tilt up from the ddjaki, where we first show her face. That confidence you see, that’s all real, because she’d finally managed to flip it over.”

So is there more ddjaki in Blanchett’s future? Back at the end of 2024, it was reported that David Fincher is working on an English-language version of Squid Game. The initial fear was that it was a remake of the Korean series, which would be highly unnecessary. And at one point, it seems that Fincher might have been working on a movie version. But as of October of last year, the project reportedly coalesced into a series. Fincher, as a contextual note, has a long-standing deal with Netflix, and has already created The Killer, Mank, Mindhunter, and Love, Death and Robots for the streamer.

While we don’t know as of this writing if David Fincher’s project is what’s being teased here or if it’s just a cool celebrity cameo of note, Fincher and Blanchett have worked together before on The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. So it’s entirely possible this is a fun tease for the potential spinoff series. Or it could be Fincher getting the hook-up for Hwang Dong-hyuk for a cameo. Either way, Squid Game seems to be far from done.

And frankly, that’s the way it should be, right? It’s more true to the series that the pervasive octopus arms of capitalism stretch all over the world. No one man’s sacrifice can change that, even if we do see hope, love, fear, and an array of non-horse-like emotions coursing through our characters in the final half-hour of the series. After all, humans are…

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.