South China Sea with its vast geopolitical importance continues to be also one of the world’s most problematic regions with a very unpredictable future in terms of security conditions and realities on the ground. The proposed paper will try to shed some light into the current situation by grasping the logic of interaction between the involved parties. It will focus on actions of individual states involved in the dispute, which will be treated as parts of a complex game situation, in which the states’ actions are reacting to each other. The two types of actions will be considered - ‘events establishing new trends’ and ‘incidents’; and these will be taking place on the backdrop of ‘long term tendencies’ which continue to push forward the overall distribution of power sources. The logic of moves by China, Vietnam, Philippines, and the US will be analyzed, including the available options and possible reactions to other states’ moves. It will be concluded that if the current dynamics continues to prevail, China will be step-by-step improving its standing due to favorable tendency of power distribution and established trends, heightened by the lack of capabilities and potentially high risks on the side of the opponent states; and lack of true commitment and potentially too big a burden for the US. The individual steps of the opponent countries may have only the effect of accelerating the process while at the same time creating more tensions.