Death's Game Manhwa Reading Guide: Where to Start and Finish

This Death's Game manhwa reading guide has a short answer: start at Episode 1 and don't stop. The webtoon finished its run years ago at 66 chapters, there's no spin-off or second season to slot in, and the whole thing works as one sentence handed down by Death, so it reads best in order and in as few sittings as you can manage.

The only real wrinkle is where you read it. WEBTOON's English web page shows just the first seven episodes and sends you to the app for the rest, and if you came from the TV drama, the webtoon is a different shape of the same story.

Death's Game manhwa reading guide: what the series is

Yijae Choi is perennially unemployed, his ex-girlfriend has moved on, and he's just lost his life savings to a bitcoin scam. He decides to take his own life. Death, insulted by how flippantly he treats dying, punishes him with her game: he has to experience death over and over again through 13 other lives. If he finds a way to survive the death coming for one of them, he gets to live out that person's lifetime.

That's the whole engine. Every life is a new body, a new set of people around it, and a clock that's already running, so the series plays like linked short stories with Yijae and Death as the frame.

The original Korean title is 이제 곧 죽습니다 ("I Will Die Soon"). Lee Won-sik wrote it and Ggulchan drew it, and it ran on Naver from April 18, 2019 to July 16, 2020, rated for readers 15 and over. It's finished, and nothing has been added since. The drama changed one letter: its Korean title, 이재, 곧 죽습니다, swaps 이제 ("now") for the hero's name, so it reads both as "Yi-jae will die soon" and "now, you will die soon".

Death's Game Korean volume 1 cover, story by Lee Won-sik, art by Ggulchan (cover via AniList).

Our Death's Game manhwa review covers what the anthology structure does well and where it runs thin, with an 8.0/10 verdict.

Death's Game manhwa reading guide: how to read it

Read in order, no skipping. That's the first rule of any Death's Game manhwa reading guide, because each life stands on its own as a story, but what Yijae takes away from one carries into the next, and the frame with Death only pays off if you've been through the lives that lead up to it.

Stop between lives, not in the middle of one. The natural breaks are where a life ends. Stopping halfway through a life loses the tension the chapter has been building.

Don't look up the ending. It's a short series, which makes it tempting to skim a summary. Its ending is the point of the sentence Death hands down, and a spoiler takes most of the weight out of it.

Expect heavy material. The premise starts with a suicide, and death is in every life after that. If that's a hard subject for you right now, it's fine to skip this one.

Death's Game on Naver: 66 weeks and the reader scores

Naver's own episode list is the cleanest record of how the series ran, and it answers the "how many chapters" question without the usual chapter-versus-episode muddle. We read it on November 4, 2026.

Naver readers also score every episode out of 10, and the scores are the closest thing to a reader map we have. Sixty of the 66 episodes sit at 9.25 or higher. The six below 9.0 are episodes 16, 17 and 18 (posted August 1 to 15, 2019), 32, 35 and 53, and the lowest by a distance is episode 17 at 6.81. Three low weeks in a row at 16 to 18 is the one stretch where the score stays down; everywhere else it bounces back the next Thursday.

We haven't matched those dips to specific lives, so treat them as a heads-up rather than a spoiler: if episodes 16 to 18 test your patience, the score was already back to 9.71 by episode 19. The ending landed with Naver readers, which matters more in a series built toward one sentence: the final episode holds 9.92.

Death's Game manhwa vs drama

The live-action Death's Game is a TVING series written and directed by Ha Byung-hoon. It came out in two parts of four episodes each, on December 15, 2023 and January 5, 2024, with Seo In-guk as Choi Yee-jae and Park So-dam as Death. Outside Korea it streams on Amazon Prime Video in selected regions, not Netflix.

Prime Video Singapore's official trailer for the drama.

The clearest structural difference is the count. The webtoon gives Yijae 13 other lives; the drama puts him through 12 cycles of reincarnation and death. The drama also builds its own villain: Park Tae-woo, a serial killer and the CEO of Taekang Group, who ties many of the deaths together.

Readers who did both say the drama reshuffled more than that. In an r/manhwa thread on the adaptation, one reader who read the webtoon and watched the show summed it up: "they changed the author girl he met at cafe to his ex girlfriend and expanded her character. they added a new CEO dude (who didn't exist in the manhwa) who is connected and the reason for most of the deaths in the series." If you watched the drama first, expect the webtoon to feel looser and more episodic, with no single villain pulling the strings.

Yijae Choi and Death in Ggulchan's webtoon art (banner art via AniList).

For more webtoons that became K-dramas, and which version to start with, see our manhwa K-drama adaptations guide.

Death's Game manhwa reading guide: where to read

WEBTOON (official English): The series is listed as completed. On the web, the episode list stops at Episode 7, all dated December 29, 2020 (December 30 in Asia and Europe), with a "Read more episodes on the app!" prompt, so plan on the WEBTOON app for the rest. WEBTOON's own page promotes it as the original story of the Amazon Prime Video series. On November 4, 2026 it showed 17.7M views and about 425,000 subscribers.

Naver Webtoon (Korean original): The Korean run is on Naver under 이제 곧 죽습니다, with a paid edition on Naver Series. On Naver the first seven episodes are free on the web; from episode 8 on, the app's free-every-24-hours unlock is the no-cost route, one episode a day, which works out to about two months for the full 66.

For how this fits into the broader format landscape, see our Manga vs Manhwa vs Manhua: What Actually Sets Them Apart. Both best completed manhwa and Death's Game share the same profile: a finished story you can start this week and close out.

Our take

Read the webtoon even if you've seen the drama. The drama is the slicker watch, and plenty of readers in that thread prefer it, but it's built around a villain and an expanded ex-girlfriend storyline that, by readers' accounts, the webtoon doesn't have. The webtoon is the stranger, lonelier version: one man, one Death, and a run of other people's last days. Give it a weekend and read it start to finish.

How We Checked This

On October 15, 2026 we re-checked the premise, the 13 lives, the creators, the Naver run dates and the status against WEBTOON's series page, AniList and the Korean Webtoons Wiki, and the drama details against Wikipedia and Prime Video's official trailer, one quoted row per fact in our sources table. That pass corrected the number of lives in the drama (12, not 13), the international platform (Amazon Prime Video, not Netflix) and the Naver link, and removed claims we couldn't source: two "cut arcs", a life-by-life arc map, chapter-length and reading-time estimates, and a FAQ that repeated them.

On November 4, 2026 we read Naver's full episode list (all 66 dates, scores and the paid markers) and WEBTOON's series page again for the table and the score notes above.

Last reviewed: November 4, 2026

Related Reading

• Death's Game manhwa review: our full verdict on whether the anthology structure holds up to the end.
• Manhwa Like Death's Game: what to read next if the second-chance-through-other-lives idea is what got you.
• Manhwa K-drama adaptations guide: other webtoon-to-drama pairs and which one to start with.
• Best short manhwa, completed: more finished series you can read in a weekend.

References

• Death's Game on WEBTOON: official English platform, completed series
• 이제 곧 죽습니다 on Naver Webtoon: Korean original
• Death's Game (TV series) on Wikipedia: drama release dates, cast and episodes
• Death's Game on the Korean Webtoons Wiki: Naver run dates and content rating