In the Netflix show Alice in Borderland, the characters play many different games and have to win them to earn cards. But what do those cards mean? With so many of them and the additional ones from Season 2, it’s easy to forget or get confused.
What is the Meaning of the Numbered Cards in Alice in Borderland?
The numbered cards are all collected throughout the first season of the show. As the numbers go up, their games get harder and harder. But that’s simple, the real trick is knowing what each suit means.
Diamond Cards
During the first season, we see one game of diamond cards: Light Bulb. This kind of game requires intelligence and fast critical thinking. To solve it, Arisu (Kento Yamazaki) had to analyze the situation and come up with a strategy with a 100% success chance.
Club Cards
The first game we see in the show is a three of clubs, meaning a game that depends on teamwork. Trust and communication are the keys to making out alive.
Heart Cards
Heart Cards are the cruelest kind of game. They are psychological games made to destroy the trust the players built and encourage betrayal. If there’s one game no one wants to play, it’s this. The first time Arisu went through one of these, it almost broke him forever.
Spade Cards
Spade cards are tests of strength and physical endurance. A character that excels at that type of game is Yuzuha Usagi (Tao Tsuchiya), as she is a skilled mountaineer.
What is the Meaning of the Face Cards?
Different from the numbered, in the second season, each of the Face cards represents citizens and all of them have games matching their suits.
King of Spades
The King of Spades is the characters’ first and most constant challenge. He is a mercenary who uses every attempt he gets to try and kill all the players. His arena is the entire country (yeah, they didn’t give the players any slack during the second season). The only thing he can’t do is interrupt other games.
King of Clubs
The players must work together to defeat Kyuma (Tomohisa Yamashita), the King of Clubs, and his team. They must do their best to follow the various rules of the game while stealing points from the enemy team.
King of Diamonds
Kuzuryu (Tsuyoshi Abe), a former Beach executive, is the King of Diamonds, and he challenges Chishiya (Nijirô Murakami) to a game of intelligence in which the player has to select a number between 0 and 100, which then has its average multiplied by 0.8 and compared with the chosen numbers to see which player was the closest.
King of Hearts
Appearing briefly, the game forces players to run around a concrete maze while they escape an animal, similar to what happened in the game Distance, during the first season.
Queen of Spades
Checkmate is a game in which the characters have to steal the players of the other team to theirs, and the team with fewer people dies.
Queen of Clubs
Ann (Ayaka Miyoshi) and Kuina (Aya Asahina) have to go through a suspended bridge while avoid being hit by the balls thrown by the enemy team.
Queen of Diamonds
We don’t get to see much of this game, we only know it took place in a car garage and that not a lot of people survived.
Queen of Hearts
It’s quite a simple game. The characters must play three rounds of croquet while not forfeiting; that’s right, they don’t even need to win. But, thanks to some tricks, it gets harder than it seems.
Jack of Spades
It’s another game that we don’t know much about, even though Kuina participated in it.
Jack of Clubs
It focuses on climbing a really tall rope while trying to swing and make the other players fall to their deaths.
Jack of Diamonds
Briefly featured in episode 7, we see it’s a version of mahjong.
Jack of Hearts
Solitary Confinement is a game in which every round you need to guess the card suit on the back of your collar without looking at it. But you also have to find the Jack of Hearts and make him guess his card wrong, so he explodes and the game ends.
Joker
We don’t know anything about it at the moment, but we’re hoping for a third season to find out.
