When you travel with your best friends but have to hang out in the hotel, you either play games, drink, or drink and play games. Since Jungkook is still underage (I think) at this stage, the games are all we get, but dammit if BTS doesn’t know how to play some games. Even when they don’t know the rules, or never really grasp them, they can still play the hell out of any game you give them.
Setup:
They play four games on the floor of a hotel room in Chicago because they have literally nothing else to do when they leave the country. That’s it, that’s the setup. Three of the games are team based and one is individual, so there is a complicated thing where if the highest individual scorer is from the losing team they don’t have to do the team penalty whereas if the lowest individual scorer is on the winning team they still have to do the penalty. No one will retain this or really follow it by the end. Let’s go!
The Moments of Pure Love:
- 1.
Barbershop starts with Jimin, Yoongi actually participating this time, but Jin destroys it by trying a high soprano out of nowhere
- 2.
Jimin starts lower and they make it around the circle to Namjoon who comes in with a dissonant minor harmony that Jungkook finds hilarious
- 3.
They start naming famous things from Chicago, such as Chicago pizza and the Chicago Bulls, and as a former resident of Chicago I can say we got off very light there
- 4.
Hoseok claims he was “known for board games” in Gwangju which is not something a person can be known for but I trust him
- 5.
Namjoon and Yoongi are chosen as captains by the producers to draft their teams
- 6.
Namjoon, winner of RPS, picks Jungkook because he’s their luckiest guy; Jungkook is scratching his back vacantly as Namjoon slaps his inner thigh
- 7.
Yoongi says the true luckiest guy is Jimin and grabs his forearm for emphasis, then calls him a survivor
- 8.
Yoongi gets the next pick and goes with Hoseok, who Taehyung dubs J-Luck
- 9.
Jungkook says, like a movie trailer announcer, that Namjoon now has to pick between two handsome men, and Namjoon picks Jin
- 10.
Yoongi proposes that the loser of the next RPS takes Taehyung, which lights a fuse that will later explode as Taehyung goes to Namjoon’s team
- 11.
They pick team names, and Yoongi immediately goes with Chica and Namjoon takes Go
- 12.
They then fast forward through approximately 10 minutes of them figuring out what the penalty for the losers will be but they can’t come up with anything so they kick it to the staff
- 13.
Game 1 is a piece of wet paper towel stretched over a circular frame - think of it like a plastic version of what someone would use for needlepoint - where teams alternately place a marble on top until it tears
- 14.
To put the marble on they use a set of plastic tweezers provided by the game; these tweezers are garbage and cause a lot of stress
- 15.
Jungkook suggests that Jin widen the tweezers slightly
- 16.
Jin acts as soon the words hit his brain and snaps them clean in half
- 17.
Yoongi tries to claim victory, but the staff gives them chopsticks instead
This reveals, to me, that the shittiness of the tweezers was actually part of the game, because the control they have now makes it easy for them to keep going
- 18.
They institute an official rule of counting to three after the marble is placed, and an unofficial rule that Hoseok has to shriek every time someone places a marble
- 19.
They count to three at hyperspeed, prompting Namjoon to say that this is the Bangtan version of three seconds
- 20.
After they run out of marbles, everyone starts dropping water from a straw in turns instead
Team Chica releases their water very carefully
Team Go, instigated by Jungkook, sprays water all over the place
- 21.
Jin is so inspired by Jungkook’s shenanigans and team Chica’s taunts that he uses his mouth to drop a lot of water, jump scaring himself when the paper towel finally breaks
- 22.
Yoongi is proud of their psychological trickery as they notch a Team Chica win
- 23.
Game 2 is getting cards with English words on them, illustrated by pictures and organized by starting letter (i.e. a card of A words, B words, etc) and seeing how many they can memorize inside of twelve seconds
- 24.
Yoongi says his memory is terrible, and I believe him after previous Run episodes where he couldn’t remember things that happened to him even that day
- 25.
Team Go has two major advantages:
They have four team members, so they can split the cards up more
They have Namjoon and his superior English skills
These work together when they give Namjoon four cards and everyone else two
- 26.
Hoseok tries to fuck with Taehyung when time is up by speaking to him in English but Taehyung has never been more focused on anything in his life and gets quite a few S and U words (six, which seems to be about 80% of the possible words)
- 27.
Jin also does well with his Y and Z cards, though as befits him he becomes the center of an argument about using the Korean word “Cheok” / “Jac” to describe zipper instead of the English borrowed word
The staff debate amongst themselves while Namjoon explains that Jac and Zipper are not the same word even though they mean the same thing
Even after everyone on his team has gone Jin is still not over it and reopens his grievances
Yoongi says that they’re not the same, and when Taehyung tries to catch him out by asking what they call it in Daegu, Yoongi smugly replies “zipper”
Jimin is highly amused by Yoongi’s brazen lying. and even Taehyung has to laugh
The staff admits that they actually didn’t know and they had to look it up on Naver but zipper is the English word so Jin still loses
- 28.
Namjoon does very well with his D, J, and C cards, but falters on the N and says that four lists were too many even for him
While he’s talking Jungkook is rocking back and forth, staring into space, and he’s either thinking intently about his own words or thinking absolutely nothing at all
Team Chica are very excited by the way that Namjoon says “crocodile”, and Jimin, Hoseok, and Yoongi all take turns repeating the word to each other while really dragging out the “ai” dipthong
- 29.
Jungkook kills his S and R cards, and they’re all quite impressed
- 30.
Team Chica gets their cards and stumbles out of the gate when they can’t even divide them up correctly; the memorization time is very very very short
- 31.
Yoongi shouts “oh man!” over and over again while making his confident winner hand gestures when they’re done, then gets exactly three words from his four cards
- 32.
He starts repeating each of the three words he said over and over again like he didn’t say them and Team Go is absolutely dying with laughter
- 33.
Yoongi sadly admits that they probably lost because of him
- 34.
Hoseok pipes up brightly to say they’ve definitely lost because he only memorized one, which gets Team Go laughing all over again
I need to point out that Hoseok is wearing a green baseball cap throughout this episode and he looks like a Keebler elf who plays third base
- 35.
Jimin gets a few from his I and K cards, and does the best of everyone
- 36.
Hoseok says he only got one from his G card, but then starts to remember other pictures he saw as he talks, like he’s a witness being questioned by the police
- 37.
Needless to say Team Go won this one handily
- 38.
Game 3 is a game called Lift It!, where you have to use a hook and line to pull blocks in various Tetris shapes into combined shown by a card you randomly draw; this is easier to picture if you actually see the game
- 39.
It’s at this point it finally dawned on me that the way they did this episode was to send one of the staff members to the downtown Chicago Target to buy 4 games they thought looked interesting, so these are not anything anyone in this room has ever played before, which made this whole thing even funnier to me
- 40.
Jungkook has to go first and he has to deal with Namjoon and Jin sitting on each side of him yelling conflicting instructions as to what he’s supposed to do; he’s wholly unbothered by this
- 41.
They’re all kind of bad at this game but sort of get the hang of it after a bit
- 42.
It’s at this point that Team Chica falls into a trap where they have to hold the hook in nonstandard ways like on their forehead or by two people holding it at the same time
- 43.
Jungkook thinks Hoseok looks fucking hilarious with the line dangling from his head and has to lay down
- 44.
At one point the editors put in the Tetris music over what they’re doing and I was going to say you could almost hear lawyers lining up to copyright claim but I guess the theme is free to use if you record it yourself; TMYK!
- 45.
Yoongi and Jin both shriek a LOT during this portion, while Namjoon sings songs loudly in their direction, and if they didn’t get at least one noise complaint from someone else in the hotel I’d be shocked
- 46.
At one point they argue about if a shape was built enough inside of the circle and Yoongi starts taunting them about the Floor Space Index, which is a concept used in architecture, and it’s hard to believe we ever thought he was anything but a massive, massive nerd
- 47.
Team Go pulls it out and Jin in particular is jubilant
- 48.
In theory this is when they would say that Team Chica lost, so Yoongi, Jimin, and Hoseok are going to be punished unless one of them gets first in the next game, and Namjoon, Jin, Taehyung, and Jungkook are safe unless one of them gets last in the next game; in practice no one has any idea about any of this
- 49.
Game 4, the individual game, is UNO, so this is the first domino to fall in the chain that leads to both BTS UNO and the New Zealand games
- 50.
Right off the bat Jimin deals the cards counterclockwise instead of clockwise so you know these guys have never played a card game in their entire lives
- 51.
Taehyung has a lot of trouble grasping the rules, and while Namjoon impatiently explains them Jungkook implies he will beat him up later off camera
- 52.
At one point they all slap Namjoon on the hand while he screams; I don’t know why as he’s not involved in the called UNO but they seem to enjoy it
- 53.
Hoseok wins out of nowhere and celebrates loudly
- 54.
Taehyung has reached UNO but doesn’t realize it, so Namjoon slaps him hard on the thigh and explains to him why
- 55.
Taehyung again reaches UNO without knowing it and gets slapped; he looks around, dumbfounded, at this chain of events
- 56.
Taehyung then just starts throwing cards in as fast as he can according to his own system of logic, and while no one is pleased with the situation Yoongi and Namjoon in particular are losing their minds as the slaps keep coming
- 57.
Yoongi at one point tells Taehyung to draw because he knows exactly what card he has in his hand, because Taehyung has tried to play it incorrectly so many times
- 58.
Taehyung happily yells UNO as he plays his last card, and Hoseok has to explain to him that this isn’t UNO, this is him getting second place; he’s once again flabbergasted
- 59.
As he takes his seat on the winners couch, Taehyung announces that he understands the game now and they all laugh
- 60.
Jungkook plays some card that will screw Jimin over, complete with proclamation
- 61.
Hoseok whispers to him in the back that he has an unrealized UNO, so Jungkook shouts it then starts doing an UNO pop and lock dance before taking third on his next turn
- 62.
Namjoon also finishes up, so Yoonmin try to strategize against Jin and fail almost immediately
- 63.
Namjoon proposes that the loser of the Yoonmin head to head is the one who has to do the penalty, but Yoongi says they both will (which would be true by the rules they laid out)
- 64.
Yoongi shuffles through the dozen cards he has in his hand, at a loss as to what he should do about them, so Jimin suggests a death match where the person who draws the lowest card number wins
- 65.
They decide the Wilds / Draw 4s are 10 and the skip is 0
- 66.
Jimin gets an 8, which is a very high number, so Yoongi calls on the God of Entertainment to help him
- 67.
Yoongi has the rest of them look at it first and they all start laughing because he pulled a reverse card, which they didn’t assign a value to
- 68.
When the rest of them try to say it’s 0, Yoongi pulls out his best sad Oliver Twist pout and says “Didn’t we just say skip was 0?” and he’s so cutely pathetic that Jimin takes pity on him and says he can draw something else
- 69.
Yoongi spreads out a bunch of cards on the ground, lays his head on top of them, and starts communing with them to figure out what to pick by tapping each with his fingers
- 70.
To everyone’s delight, he draws another 8! A tie!
- 71.
They go again, Yoongi once more communing for guidance, and he gets a Draw 4 while Jimin gets a 1, leaving Jimin as the only one getting a penalty
- 72.
Jimin is a very good sport about the fact that he essentially generosity-ed himself into this because he knows Yoongi is taking this competition very seriously, and it’s fine because they never say what the penalty is or show him doing it, so I’m pretty sure they all just decided not to have him do anything in the end!
The Finish Line:
This is perhaps the lowest budget episode they’ve ever done since the early days of the filming, and certainly the least complex concept, and yet it remains a delight. While it’s somewhat diminished by being sandwiched between some of the greatest episodes of the series, I had a lot of fun watching it and just laughing along. It felt very much like friends hanging out, and we got to be one of them, and that’s a cozy feeling for usually chaotic Run.
It helped that, for me, unlike most Run episodes I actually knew the rules of these games already and could easily grasp them. That might not have been true for everyone, particularly non-Americans, but knowing that in the future there will be many episodes where I have absolutely no idea what they’re doing or why, this was a lovely exception in my brain.
And, of course, this again proves the concept that you don’t need BTS to do fancy things to be entertaining, you just have to shove them in a room together, give them a vague direction, and turn the cameras on to get enough entertainment for us all!