Survivor 48's Opening Moves

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The marooning is an unfathomable moment.

For most Survivor players of the New Era, it is long in the making– the culmination of years of loving the show, applying, and dreaming of being the “woman in front” or the “guy in the middle” who announces their name to Jeff and the rest of the Survivor world. But when it finally happens for real, you are overcome with a strange, out-of-body feeling for which there is hardly any reference to describe.

And when you’re half blacked out from adrenaline, Jeff will wake you up with a slice of wisdom, as he did for the cast of Survivor 48:

Each of the 18 new castaways are realizing at that moment that they are no longer a fan, or an applicant, or a casting finalist. They are Survivor players, and they’re in it right now.

In that respect Jeff’s words ring true: the game has begun, and every single action from here on out matters. This, of course, is immediately fulfilled by the initial challenge, where you are beset by the pressure to perform. But that part is mostly reflexive. It’s something you’ve hyped yourself up for, and have no choice but to attack. The same could also be said for when you first arrive at your tribe camp, and introduce yourself to your new tribemates. This is all part of the ritual, this is something you’ve envisioned for a long time, and in that way it’s nearly automatic. All you have to do is fight off the feeling of surrealness and stick to the script.

But that only gets you through the morning. At a time very soon after, you will have crossed the threshold in a much more substantial and irrevocable way, and that is by making your first real game decision.

This will come at a brief but electric moment when you take an action you did not predetermine, and that could only come from bouncing off the dynamics of the five particular human beings you’re living with. It is when all of your years of theorizing about the game are thrown to the side, and your instincts take over. It’s a horrifying thrill, and it should be… because it means taking a leap with an uncertain outcome, one that will set the trajectory for your entire game. That is when you finally become a Survivor player, and it can lead to glory or failure, eventually fall to ruin or be overcome, but no matter what, there are no redos.

Now, readers will recall that last season I put on an absolute masterclass on how not to start Survivor. My first real game decision happened on Night 2, when I debated whether to resign myself to being anxious and completely sleepless before the morning’s immunity challenge, or to attempt to do something about it. That is when I woke up Rachel and thereby set off a long, chaotic chain of actions, reactions, and Southern European machinations that defined the absolute roller coaster of my game.

The casts of Survivor 48 and future seasons should take heart to know that you can come back from an opening blunder. But recovery or not, there is no doubt that if I had made a different decision, everything subsequent would have changed, and my entire game would have gone in some different, perhaps orthogonal, direction.

What were the opening moves made by our new players? Kyle’s first decision came earlier than most, when he agreed to compete in the Fight for Supplies challenge. We don’t know if this was part of Kyle’s playbook. It almost certainly wasn’t, as this type of volunteering usually results from a split-second gut decision after gauging the cues from your tribemates. Regardless, he knew as soon as he put his hand up that it would in some way chart a course for his entire adventure on season 48.

And when that jug shattered, he immediately felt the consequences of his decision. He’ll never get to know the first impression he would’ve made if he arrived at Civa beach with the others. Instead, he put himself in a hole that he’ll have to actively dig himself out of to find footing in the game. But maybe even more noteworthy was his second game decision, when he decided to help an injured Kevin fill his jug more quickly. When you prepare for playing Survivor, you will never have the foresight to say, “Okay, if I lose the Fight for Supplies challenge I’m going to help my competitor in order to build an early relationship.” That comes from being present and discovering in real-time the type of player you will actually be, whether or not it matches up with your preconceived image, and these formative decisions will incite the Survivor Butterfly Effect for the rest of the 26 days.

Next, we can look at the opening moves at Vula, where two diametrically opposed gamestyles were on display. Both Sai and Stephanie seemed to arrive with premeditated approaches. Sai had the self-awareness to know that hitting the beach at a breakneck pace was going to be her game, whereas Stephanie appeared confident that tamping down her innate leadership would serve her well at the start.

For Sai, her first real decision was whom to work with and against, and how she would navigate within her budding alliance. This presented itself when she found the Beware Advantage:

Even if she would have kept the advantage a secret had the task been something she was more confident in, this decision set the tone for her grouping with Kevin, Justin, and Cedrek, and is toothpaste that cannot go back into the tube. Something we can already credit to Sai is her commitment: she knows how she wants to play, and once she makes a decision, she leans into it with full force. She fully included her alliance into the Beware task, and was very decisive with her plan to target Stephanie.

Stephanie, too, was decisive in her own way. Her plan from the very start was to play a social-first game as a means of letting the strategy come to her. That is a tried and true approach and no less valid of a strategy than Sai’s: we’ve seen many examples, including even in this episode, of players putting their best foot forward socially, like Stephanie intended to do, and being rewarded with invitations to multiple alliances.

Unfortunately for Stephanie, the specific dynamics of Vula were such that those opportunities never truly came. There was certainly a moment within the first three days where she could have pivoted and changed her pace, but she made the decision to stick to her guns. We’re not results-oriented here at The Confessional, but we can say with certainty that this choice defined her game.

Over on Lagi, we see players make the ultimate early decision: who will be my number one? Many come in looking for a ride-or-die, but actually choosing one must happen in the moment, and it carries consequences larger than any other.

Eva made her opening move with intentionality. She is another person with a deep awareness, and knows what it is she needs to navigate Survivor with her autism. She made a beeline toward Joe and determined that he was to be not just the ally for her, but also her support.

And this in turn was the inciting incident for Joe’s entire game. Whatever he had in his mind about his impending Survivor journey, there’s no way he could have accounted for this specific connection and what it means for him. It was a true turning point:

I doubt he predicted that he would say this about a competitor so early into the game, and yet he has stayed true to his instincts and leapt into it fully.

We don’t know where this path will lead for Joe and Eva, but no matter what happens with their bond, the significance of the moment itself cannot be undone. The same goes for the 17 remaining castaways, each of whom have played their opening. Just as in chess, where the decision to open with pawn to E4 or pawn to D4 looks insignificant to the untrained eye, it’s the most important move you’ll make, and sets the foundation for the game at hand.

-Andy Rueda

Andy Rueda was one of the standout characters and strategists of Survivor 47, where he helped orchestrate Operation: Italy, one of the most jaw-dropping moves of the new era. Originally from Buffalo, Andy now lives in Brooklyn where he is a data scientist.

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