Elimination shocker: Squid Game: The Challenge season 2 premiere begins with a 344-player mass elimination

Squid Game: The Challenge, season 2, has been released, with the first four episodes premiering on Tuesday, November 4, 2025, only on Netflix. 

The series consists of nine episodes, with the next four episodes set to release on November 11, 2025, and the season finale scheduled to air on November 18. 2025 on Netflix.

A total of 456 players were featured in the premiere from all over the world competing to win a lavish prize of $4.56 million, which is the second largest cast and third largest cash prize in reality competition history.

Each player participates in a series of children's games just like the television series. But unlike the Korean show, this reality series eliminates or votes them off who lose in games throughout the season.

The games featured in this season of Squid Games: The Challenge include The Count, Six-Legged Pentathlon, Catch, Mingle, Marbles, Slides and Ladders, Circle of Trust, and the final game.

The premiere titled Six Legs started with wiping out more than half of the original participants with a mass elimination of 344 players, as it introduced two games: The Count, which divided all of them into two teams, and The Six-Legged Pentathlon, forming five-member teams moving forward.

Squid Games: The Challenge premiere details explored

Netflix's Squid Games: The Challenge season 2 episode 1 kicked off with a children's counting game, moments after the players entered the dorm, which was equivalent to the voting section of the games.

Two volunteers were asked to raise their hands. Identical twin brothers Raul and Jacob (players 431 and 432) raised their hands and then asked to stand on X and O symbols. Raul told Parade:

I think in the moment we were kind of just like, ‘let’s just do it.’ No matter what happens, let’s just do it. We’re here, and it’s going to be very unlikely that we win because we’ve already got a target on our backs, as the twins. So why not just like send it from the start, you know?

All the 456 layers were then split evenly into two teams, Team O and Team X, and the challenge was to press a buzzer exactly after 456 seconds, ie, 7 minutes and 36 seconds. The team closest to the time would only survive and move forward.

Team O was in the dorm, and Team X was in the white room. The Xs were out by two seconds and the Os by twelve seconds, resulting in all the players of Team O getting eliminated.

However, player 431 (Raul) was saved as he led the team, but with a twist that he had to eliminate three players personally with a handshake, saying Good luck in the game. Failure to do so would have led to his elimination.

He took the given one-hour time to decide and then eventually picked player 107 (Jackie) and players 285 and 286 (Bryce and Blake), a pair of twin brothers, to eliminate, as he told Parade:

Internally, I was just thinking, this is a good step forward in winning the money. I felt bad at the time, but my initial thought was, ‘This is a game, this is good.’ The less people, the closer you are to the final.

After The Count, 230 players remained in the Squid Game: The Challenge, with the next game being the Six-Legged Pentathlon, which divided the rest of them into teams of 10 and then eventually into two teams of 5.

Each five-member team races through five children’s mini-games, in a relay format including Ball in Cup, Biseokchigi, Gong-gi, House of Cards, and Jegi. The one team that advanced faster and finished first was the winner, while the other one got eliminated.

Stay tuned for more updates.