WARNING: This article contains SPOILERS for Alice in Borderland season 2.
Alice in Borderland season 2 games were bigger and far more complex to beat than the ones from season 1. As teased at the end of Alice in Borderland season 1, Phase 2 was about beating the Face Card games. Instead of collecting cards, players now had to “destroy” all the Face Cards to find out more about the world they were in.
Winning a Face Card game meant killing the King, Queen, or Jack responsible for that game. While the Netflix live-action adaptation of Alice in Borderland changed a few elements from the manga, most of the games were close to the original versions. Here’s how to beat every Alice in Borderland season 2 game.
How To Beat The King Of Clubs’ Osmosis
The King of Clubs’ Osmosis seems like a game of tag at first, but it is a bit more complicated. Just like every Clubs game, the King of Clubs’ Osmosis is played in teams – the players versus the citizens. While almost every Alice in Borderland game leads to characters dying, Osmosis was the first time Arisu and Usagi had to actively play against other people’s lives to win. Each team starts with 10,000 points, and each player gets a fraction of that total. The players are free to divide the points however they want, as long as everyone has at least 100 points.
A popular Alice in Borderland fan theory is that one single player should be given 9,600 points, while the other four players protect the base. That way, a player would likely never lose a battle. However, each winning battle only adds 500 points, far less than what the items offer.
Also, just one player would never be able to find a lot of items in such a large area. Therefore, Arisu and his friends had to go to the “battlefield” - as this offers a viable method of obtaining more points than simply battling it out does. Tatta’s sacrifice was not necessarily the only strategy that would have worked, but it was an effective last-minute resource after Kuina failed to touch the rival base.
How To Beat The Jack Of Hearts’ Solitary Confinement
Arguably the best game in season 2 of the Netflix show, the Jack of Hearts’ Solitary Confinement was one of the cruelest Heart games precisely because it was the opposite of what a player would expect from a Hearts game. In all previous Heart games, including the infamous Seven of Hearts, playing with friends was something to avoid at all costs as betrayal was always involved. However, in the Jack of Hearts, playing with a friend is by far the easiest way to survive. If a player has at least one friend who they can absolutely trust, then the Jack of Hearts is really not a challenge.
Players would then only need to check each other’s suits at the end of every round, without caring about the rest of the players. That is what Alice in Borderland’s Chishiya, who didn’t play the Jack of Hearts in the manga, did during most of the game thanks to his newfound friend. Had Chishiya's partner not given up the game, Chishiya wouldn’t have had any problems. In the Alice in Borderland manga, the Jack of Hearts was a more difficult - the Jack had access to a screen in his covered eye. Therefore, players couldn’t trick the Jack – they had to corner and threaten them into giving up.
How To Beat The Queen Of Spades’ Checkmate
The Queen of Spades’ Checkmate was a game created exclusively for the Netflix live-action adaptation of Alice in Borderland. As a game of spades, Checkmate involved the players’ physical skills, but also involved the players’ spirits. In fact, the key to winning the Queen of Spades’ Checkmate was convincing as many people as possible that beating all the Alice in Borderland Battle Royale games and returning home was worth fighting for – not just being faster or more agile than the Queen’s Team. Checkmate has a winning team, meaning that players can simply let them be captured by the Queen if they believe she has a bigger chance of winning.
However, if the Queen of Spades won, every player on her team would be giving up the chance of leaving the Borderlands. As revealed in the Alice in Borderland season 2 finale, staying at the Borderlands meant dying in the real world. No matter how fast and agile a player is in Checkmate, if most people decided to play for the Queen, it would become almost impossible to win. That is why Arisu and Usagi had to first convince at least four other players to fight for the Players Team no matter what before trying to tag the remaining ones - as recruiting other is the most integral part of winning this particular game.
How To Beat The King Of Diamonds’ Beauty Contest
The King of Diamonds’ Beauty Contest was one of the most challenging to follow Alice in Borderland season 2 games, involving both mathematics and deception. Each player would pick a number between 0 and 100; the arithmetic mean between those numbers would be calculated and multiplied by 0.8, and the closest number to the final result would be the winning one at each round. The game would get more complicated after every death, as one new rule was then added. While the first round is mostly random, players have to try to anticipate their opponents' choices from round two onward in a battle of the minds.
A player in the Netflix live-adaptation games can’t simply guess what numbers all the other players will choose in the King of Diamonds’ Beauty Contest, but must try to anticipate what range of numbers will be picked. For example, after the first round, the King of Diamonds players realized that the final number would tend to get lower at each round, as no one would risk a higher number than the previous one. Essentially, the King of Diamonds involved a lot of luck and a bit of a guessing game. There is no trick to beat the King of Diamonds, and the final rounds are limited to a rock paper scissor game.
How To Beat The King Of Spades’ Arena
Alice in Borderland’s King of Spades is almost not an actual game. Instead of the Squid Game-like traditional games, the King of Spades happened across the entire city of Tokyo, as suggested by the game’s name – Arena. The rules were simple: the King of Spades would kill anyone in his path, and the only way to win the game was by killing the King of Spades. After the initial encounter with the King of Spades at the beginning of Alice in Borderland season 2, players realized that they had to hide from the masked man and only engage against the super soldier with a solid plan and backup.
Alice in Borderland’s Aguni, for example, tried to use Arisu as bait to kill the King of Spades, but still failed. The King of Spades nearly killed most characters in an episode that sparked discussions about Alice in Borderland’s plot armor, a price they had to pay in order to corner the King of Spades and explode the room he was in. Without a large team of people that are willing to risk their lives against the King of Spades as seen in season 2, episode 7, a player cannot beat Alice in Borderland’s most difficult physical game.
How To Beat The Queen Of Hearts’ Croquet
The final Alice in Borderland game, the Queen of Hearts’ Croquet, little has to do with an actual game of Croquet. A player does not even have to win the actual game of Croquet – they only have to play three rounds without giving up. The trick, as Arisu realized in the Alice in Borderland season 2 finale, is that the Queen of Hearts knows exactly how to manipulate whoever gets that far in the game. For example, Arisu was obsessed with finding the truth about the Alice in Borderland world, something that the Queen of Hearts Mira used against him.
What initially appeared to be a major Alice in Borderland twist was just the Queen of Hearts playing with Arisu’s expectations and theories about the Borderlands. The Queen of Hearts’ Croquet is about breaking the player's spirit and making them give up returning to the real world. Therefore, the Queen of Hearts is the final test for the victims of the meteorite explosion to decide whether they will return from their cardiac arrest or not. To beat Alice in Borderland’s Mira's game, a player must have a strong will to leave the Borderlands and return to the real world – just like Arisu and Usagi.
Will There Be A Joker Game In Alice In Borderland Season 3?
Alice in Borderland was missing a Joker card game. In the Alice in Borderland manga, there is no Joker card game. Instead, the Joker is a mysterious figure that takes the souls of those who decided to leave the Borderlands back to the real world. However, the Netflix show ended with a shot of a Joker card in the real world. Alice in Borderland season 2’s Joker can be interpreted as if life is the final game, the most unpredictable of them all. There is also the possibility that the Joker card is a tease for Alice in Borderland season 3, although the show has already covered all of the manga.