An envelope arrives with a hundred million yen inside and one rule attached: take your opponent's money, or finish the round owing yours. Nao Kanzaki, honest to the point of helplessness, opens hers and finds she has been entered in the Liar Game Tournament. She goes looking for help and comes back with Shinichi Akiyama, a swindler just out of prison, who agrees to sit at the table with her.

Shinobu Kaitani builds every round as a closed system: a handful of players, a pot of borrowed money, and rules written so that telling the truth costs you. Voting games, smuggling games, auctions, elimination brackets. The rules fit on a page and the exploits run for chapters, and that gap is where the series lives. Kaitani draws plainly, saving his detail for faces, hands, and the diagrams players scrawl to show each other the trap they are standing in. Long stretches are nothing but people talking around a table, and they are the best stretches.

Serialized in Shueisha's seinen magazine Weekly Young Jump from February 2005 to January 2015, a full decade. A Fuji TV drama followed in 2007 with a second season and two films, a Korean version aired in 2014, and Madhouse's anime premiered in April 2026.