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FYRidicule's Survivor Challenge Reference - Challenges Defined |
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| Challenge Type |
Description |
Appearances |
| 21 Sticks | The old "take turns removing a number of sticks from a pile, whoever takes the last stick loses" game. My friends who are smarter than me assure me that this should be easy for anyone to win, but it's beyond me. Which is sad, because I once programmed such a game for a school assignment, creating various computer opponents named after members of the Wu-Tang Clan who employed different strategies to try and defeat you. Best game ever. | S5:6:IC |
| Attack Zone Game | Oh man, these rule. Survivors move around on planks in the ocean, and victory is more or less determined by your ability to throw other Survivors into the surf when you're in the Attack Zone (or some other variant not endowed with this magnificent, magnificent phrase). The first really great new challenge in a long time. | S5:3:RC S7:4:IC |
| Balance and Race | A footrace on something narrow that you can fall off of. | S1:10:RC |
| Balance Endurance | Distinct from “Hands on a Hard Idol,” this is another challenge dedicated to standing around for hours on end until the players give up or screw up one by one. The big difference between this and the Endurance challenge is that it emphasizes balance over other types of endurance. Typically, the Survivors are standing on some unsteady or difficult thing, or having to hold a tricky position. There is often an obvious, dramatic losing condition (usually, falling in or, in the case of lame, parched Africa, being doused by, water). | S1:11:IC S2:7:IC S4:7:IC S5:13:IC2 S6:7:IC S6:13:IC2 S7:14:IC2 |
| Blindfolded and Directed | A potentially dangerous challenge which has yet to produce any satisfying accidents. All the members but one (selected by her teammates) are blindfolded; then, the non-blindfolded person directs the others to gather widgets or complete lame tasks clumsily. | S2:6:RC S4:5:RC S5:2:RC S6:2:RC |
| Breath-Holding | A challenge that revolves primarily around how long people can stay underwater without going up for air. Fun to watch because everyone looks funny, and it tests "endurance" (or lung capacity, depending on your perspective) in an unusual way. | S1:7:IC S5:8:IC |
| Buck-Buck | The teams carry a bunch of heavy stuff to their chosen sucker(s), who has/have to hold all of it up. One of the rare examples of a team challenge centered around a single (or a few) player(s). And like all hypermasculinized strength contests, it's incredibly great to watch and gives a chance for shocking feats of willpower-induced strength (see Christa, Savage, and Mike Skupin). | S2:3:RC S7:3:IC S7:6:IC |
| Build A Fire | This challenge, occasionally embellished or made overly complicated, basically revolves around the Survivors’ ability to run around, gather wood, and put together a fire largely from scratch. (Magnifying glasses have, I think, been sometimes provided.) Appeared as an IC in episodes 9-10 for ages until it suddenly mutated into a tribal RC for S6. | S1:10:IC S2:10:IC S3:9:IC S4:10:IC S6:4:RC |
| Build Something First | The tribes are given materials and/or instructions on something they’ll need for the challenge in advance. The challenge itself is usually just an obvious application of whatever it was they built, although it’s sometimes a hybrid. Pre-merge, it calls for teamwork, ingenuity, and THEN the stuff that actually gets done at the challenge. Post-merge, it’s hard to say; the only application as an individual challenge was the comic-relief kite-flying game. I can't help but notice that this challenge has not shown up in three seasons now. Why on Earth not??? Nothing "stranded in the jungle" like building stuff out of bamboo and coconuts. | S1:3:IC S2:5:RC S4:3:RC S4:8:RC |
| Bungee Run | Familiar to attendees of high school lock-ins and county fairs nationwide. Survivors wear a harness around their torsos; from their back runs a bungee cord to some start point. They have to race forward to grab items or complete some other task even as the tension of the cord is pulling them backwards. | S6:8:RC |
| Carabiner Sprint | The Survivors have to run around hooked to ropes using carabiners. This challenge seems to be quite dead, either because it's hard to keep track of how much people follow the rules (see the much-discussed screwup in the S2 edition) or because it's hard to cover up the fact that this is just an ordinary race with the yawningly unhelpful twist that somebody might potentially be a good runner but all thumbs with the carabiners. | S1:8:IC S2:11:RC |
| Cargo Net Climb | The Survivors hurl themselves one at a time onto a big cargo net construct in order to retrieve some thingies. First team to get all the thingies wins. This is similar to the Tied-Together Race in that one horrible player can completely wipe out a team. Seems to be a dead challenge. | S3:4:RC |
| Coconut Chop | "Mental" version of Projectile Elimination introduced in S4: Survivors answer trivia questions, and when they get them right they can chop off somebody's sack of coconuts, put a coconut in their trough, or otherwise bring them one step closer to being eliminated from the game. The trivia variant makes it easier to hide the fact that you're deliberately throwing the challenge, which is kinda cool, but I still think these games are cheap (see Projectile Elimination). | S4:8:IC S5:10:IC S6:8:IC S7:9:IC |
| Coconut Maze | A triumph of editing can make this Labyrinth-type game surprisingly interesting. It’s a great "teamwork" challenge and with its leader/follower arrangement, a decent change of pace from the Blindfolded and Directed games - I had it on my list of definites for S5 or S6 but it hasn't even shown up after S7! What's the deal? | S4:3:IC |
| Concentration | Memory game, for example, a bunch of items are hidden and you have to find matching pairs or gather them in the nearby area in a lame scavenger hunt kind of thing. Very bad television, although the memorize-the-numerals version from S5 wasn't so bad. Still, it seems like coming up with these "mental" challenges couldn't require that much "mental" energy, right? | S2:13:IC S3:8:IC S5:9:IC S6:2:IC |
| Confrontational Balancing | Really fun challenge comprised of a series of one-on-one matches, eliminating down to a final contest. The skill at work is balancing on some floating object; you have a way of trying to unbalance your foe (rope, you’re both on the same beam, whatever). Great TV - neat "physical" challenge that isn't the usual hauling type of deal, and seeing Survivors pitted in direct combat with each other is just fantastic. I had this as a longshot pick to return in S5, but lo and behold, it returns...in S6! There is justice in this world. | S2:9:IC S6:6:RC |
| Dig Up Stuff | New type of challenge by my reckoning: stuff is buried in marked locations and the challenge is succesfully digging it up. For added challenge, some of the burial spots are in the surf, making them hard to find and harder to dig up. Not sure if it will ever appear again, it's very "pirate" themed and may thus be S7-specific. | S7:4:RC |
| Diving | Challenges that emphasize swimming around underwater, for example to retrieve lightweight items from the ocean floor. Hard sometimes to separate from Breath Holding challenges. | S4:10:RC S7:8:IC |
| Division of Labor Race | The tribes each select different members for different tasks; when the game begins, they do their different jobs, perhaps in sequence or perhaps semi-simultaneously. Really really cool challenge, seemingly dead after S1 but thankfully revived starting with S4. The only stumbling block has apparently been coming up with satisfactory and equal tasks for everybody to do - nothing has quite touched the S1 version, which is a rare statement indeed. | S1:4:IC S4:6:RC S5:1:IC S7:5:RC |
| Eating | With hands behind backs, the Survivors had to use their teeth to rip chunks of meat off a large slab and deposit them in bowls. Mm mm good! | S6:6:IC |
| Escape The Cage | Recent-season midgame standby; the teams are in ramshackle cages and have to get out. Usually this involves some knot-untying, some attempts to reach a distant key, and maybe some hasty tunnel-digging. This isn't a bad challenge at all, although the suspiciously rigged-seeming game in S7 is a bit of a downer. | S5:7:IC S6:3:IC S7:7:RC |
| Endurance | Any challenge that revolves around being placed in a very uncomfortable position, but does not really revolve around balance per se (see Balance Endurance). This includes the now very familiar “hands on a hard idol” challenge in which the Survivors have to stand (often forced into an uncomfortable position) with their hands on a totem. This seems to be reserved for the final immunity challenge at the F3, presumably because it’s dramatic and emphasizes themes of endurance and “Outlasting” at a time when everyone’s strength is gone. Note that some versions of this challenge are controversial because some people believe they favor people with less upper body strength, who have lower centers of gravity. | S1:13:IC2 S3:7:IC S3:13:IC2 S4:13:IC2 |
| Fallen Comrades | The Survivors answer trivia questions about their former fellow castaways. This is witnessed by the jury; presumably, the drama lies in the fact that not only will the winner get immunity, but he or she will gain the respect of the jury for knowing so much about them. Alternately, they may be cheated out of a million dollars by CBS’s incompetent researchers; either way the challenge is kind of a snooze because beyond guessing “Ooh, I bet that guy will do good on that one, he seems like a real schmoozer,” there’s no drama since the audience (except the geeks) doesn’t know the answers to the questions. | S1:13:IC1 S2:14:IC S3:13:IC1, S4:13:IC1 |
| Family Fraud | Survey says....cool challenge! A nice alternative to Fallen Comrades where the Survivors take a survey about each other ("Who is the most attractive castaway?") and then win points by guessing what the most popular answers were. I think this is even better than Fallen Comrades at testing social skills, and also a lot more amusing. | S6:10:IC |
| Fill Something | A challenge frankly stolen from Double Dare; the Survivors have to do things to fill up a container past a little line. I expected this to quietly go the way of Mud Absorption (which is really a sub-variant, but such a bad one it deserves its own category) but it reappeared again in S7, to once again affect the outcome of the game for no good reason at all. | S4:9:RC S7:13:IC |
| Finders Keepers | The Survivors have to go into a cluttered place and find some specified items. Amazingly, whole Nickelodeon game shows were once based around this idea. It can’t even carry 15 minutes of Survivor. One of the worst low-budget desperation challenges, this seems to be dead, dead, dead. | S1:6:RC |
| Fire-Themed Hauling Race | The first IC is almost always the teams dragging around fire in some way or another (in S7's case, symbolically). Sure it's predictable, but you may as well hit them with the most physically intense challenge before they're too starved to make it look good, and the fire thing is so thematically potent. Why it was absent from S5-6 I can't imagine. | S1:1:IC S2:1:IC S3:1:IC S4:1:IC S7:1:IC |
| Fishing | Survivors are given two "equally good spots" to go fishing, and haul in the heaviest catch they can in a certain amount of time. Possible unfairness aside, I like this because it's a test of "survival skills" besides building a fire. | S6:4:IC |
| Food Auction | Not really a “challenge,” but it replaces the RC when it appears: the Survivors use hilariously! large amounts of local currency to desperately bid for more junk food, small foodstuffs, and the ever-popular mystery platter. Hijinks ensue! All sarcasm aside, I love these, and I know I'm not alone. It was really strange for it to show up so early in S5, though - they were hardly hungry enough to care! | S2:10:RC S3:10:RC S5:5:RC S6:10:RC |
| Giant Board Game | The Survivors (or, sometimes, surrogates) stand on a giant-size game board and play a game, usually a “when you leave a square, flip it over” kind of thing. This Wild & Crazy Kids leftover still has some life in it, but it hasn't shown up in unadulterated form in quite some time. (S4 featured a Giant Board Game...played by the visiting family members. Lame!) | S1:9:IC S2:8:IC |
| Go Fish | Interesting individual-esque tribal challenge which would work just as well as an individual challenge. Very social 'mixer' challenge where people stand at different lecterns and basically, well, they play Go Fish against each other, with local color items instead of cards. Worked pretty good, but maybe that was just because of the absurd sexual tension between/within certain castaways on S6... | S6:3:RC |
| Gross Food Challenge | One of the most-remembered challenges in Survivor; in fact, it really wouldn't be Survivor without it! (Thailand notwithstanding.) The Survivors have to eat gross things which are sometimes related to the local culture. Fun spec challenge: figure out, pre-season, what the gross food will be. Note that after four straight seasons of being the Episode 2 IC (a streak matched only by the Episode 1 IC being the Fire-Themed Hauling Race), this went AWOL for a season and then suddenly became an individual IC for one round. Who knows why? | S1:2:IC S2:2:IC S3:2:IC S4:2:IC S6:9:IC S7:5:IC |
| Haul-Swim-Dig | My clumsy name for this jumbled challenge. Basically....it's the challenge from Pearl Islands episode 2 IC. If something like it shows up again I'll write a better description. | S7:2:IC |
| Hauling | The Survivors have to move something really heavy from one spot to another. I’m pretty lenient with including variants here; I think they test about the same thing. And as you can see, it's a popular one with the producers - no other "physical" challenges taxes upper body strength and cardiovascular endurance with this level of intensity. | S1:3:RC S2:2:RC S3:2:RC S3:4:IC S5:2:IC S5:4:RC S7:2:RC |
| Hauling & Rowing | While both hauling and rowing amount to upper body strength/endurance tests, I felt the need to single this one out for having equal parts of each. But I dunno, maybe I'll just fold it into Hauling in the next update. Thoughts? | S4:2:RC |
| Herding | The Survivors try to direct a number of rampaging animals into pens. Sadly, the animals are too docile to do any real damage to the Survivors, and anyway the best strategy is to just turn the game into a Hauling, or perhaps “Hurling” challenge by picking up the animals and flinging them around. While it was kind of fun to see everybody running around amidst the animals (and my Survivor buddies thought the goats were cute), the players themselves quickly figured out that it was better to skip the herding and just carry the goats, making any future versions of this challenge guaranteed borefests. Don't expect to see it again. | S3:5:RC |
| Make The Picture | Tile puzzle or other thing where basically there’s some image you’re trying to recreate and you have to move around flat things to do it. Usually makes for lame TV - it's better when the puzzle is something someone sitting at home can understand and figure out (see the S5 Tower of Hanoi game). These games absolutely dominated S5 and have flown the coop since - we increasingly see these visual logic games in much larger, more elaborate games where they're swamped by more pressing tasks. | S2:4:RC S3:5:IC S4:4:IC S5:3:IC S5:4:IC S5:11:IC S5:12:IC |
| Match Your Family's Answer | Cute, Family Channel-esque game where the visiting (or telecommunicating) family members and the Survivors are asked the same questions, and if their answers match, the Survivor gets a point. The fun here is seeing which Survivors seem to have really dysfunctional, noncommunicative relationships with their friends, family, and lovers - see Darrah's utterly clueless boyfriend in the Pearl Islands edition. | S3:11:RC S7:11:RC |
| Maze | Team challenge – run around, sticking together as a tribe, in a maze, gathering widgets which must be brought to a specified point in order to win. Finally showed up as an individual challenge (with a blindfold element) in S6, and it was about as easy to follow as the team versions... | S2:5:IC S4:6:IC S6:13:IC1 |
| Memorize The Story | Jeff tells the Survivors a rambling, seemingly aimless story with local native themes. The Survivors squint at him and are eventually forced to run around and locate kiosks where they’re quizzed on the contents of the story. No doubt the story is much longer than the editing suggests and there is a lot more irrelevant information thrown in, because this is usually comes across as the Survivors’ big chance to prove they have no short-term memory skills whatsoever. It’s also a big chance to fumble in memorable ways, as demonstrated by Keith, Neleh, and Kathy all dropping the tokens gathered to prove they’ve successfully answered the questions, and Rudy’s still-classic “I dunno.” Note that after four seasons of teaching millions of Americans minute facts about remote parts of the world, this challenge apparently went the way of the Dodo - and thus we never got the chance to learn that the Dodo went extinct in the 17th century as a result of overhunting by Dutch sailors. Maybe if there's a Survivor: Mauritius? | S1:12:IC S2:11:IC S3:10:IC S4:12:IC |
| Mud Absorption | The Survivors attempt to carry as much mud as possible into a bucket in a limited time, using only their bodies and clothes. This weird, goofy challenge would have been better received if more young, beautiful types had played it. Please, MB, bring it back! Not. Thankfully we now have the Food Auction to get our late-game comic relief challenge. | S1:12:RC |
| Obstacle Course | Running around and doing a bunch of obstacle-coursey stuff. But no special gimmicks. | S1:6:IC S5:9:RC |
| Oceanic Obstacle Course | Miscellaneous-skills game set on platforms in the ocean. Don't ask me. | S7:12:RC |
| Paired-Up Obstacle Course | A post-merge challenge where the players partner off and run through obstacles. The players may choose to simply hurl their partners around like bags of sand if this proves more expedient and the hurled player seems oblivious to it. Invariably done at the Final 8 to allow a three-heat elimination game. It's only really fun when the pairs are comic mismatches, forced begrudgingly into working together, but this happens more than you might think. | S2:9:RC S3:9:RC S5:10:RC S7:10:RC |
| Practice Then Employ This Limited Skill | The Survivors are given some sort of equipment, with which they are supposed to practice well in advance of the challenge... although the exact terms of the challenge are not typically spelled out (“It’s these things you will use / And if you don’t refuse / The challenge you’ll win / So give it a spin.”). I like this game a lot. | S1:5:RC S1:8:RC S2:8:RC S3:6:IC S4:9:IC S6:9:RC |
| Projectile Elimination | Use a vaguely native-themed weapon to smash vaguely native-themed targets representing the other Survivors. In some fashion, this smashing will eliminate the other players and leave one person victorious. I maintain that these types of games are unfair and unfun, at least so long as they're for immunity (which they always are) - the whole idea of getting immunity is to protect yourself from any angry mobs that might want to cut you down through their strength in numbers. The Coconut Chop is a trivia-based variant of this, and a little more palatable. | S2:11:IC S3:11:IC S4:11:IC S7:10:IC |
| Rock Rolling | I considered this as possibly being a variant of Hauling, but I think it involves different skills. Anyway, the team has to work together to maneuver giant boulders around a course. The only potentially great new challenge to come out of S3, and it hasn't been reused since. What's the deal? Look, paint the rock with tikis, have it send up a bunch of steam when you reach the goal (like the Atlaspheres on American Gladiators) and you're all set. Maybe it was deemed too dangerous when Mama Kim got crushed under the rock... | S3:3:RC |
| Ropes Course | The Survivors fling themselves randomly around a jungle-gym of ropes to gather tokens. Aside from being horribly dangerous, it looks like a lot of fun. | S1:9:RC S6:12:IC |
| Rowing | As with "Hauling and Rowing" I'm not sure if this is worth keeping as a separate category. As the Gervase/Kelly contest proved, it's not about rowing expertise at all, but rather upper body strength. | S1:5:IC |
| Shooting For Shuffleboard | Strange, probably one-time-only game where the Survivors first have to use a slingshot (I think it was a slingshot) to get tokens which they later use in a shuffleboard-type game: sling your token across the table and hope to get close to the bulls-eye. Strangely random-feeling, especially since the tokens already on the board can act as obstacles - or get knocked out of the goal area, which is sort of cheap. | S6:11:IC |
| Sink That Boat | Cool team challenge - the teams are divided into two boats each, and paddle around trying to pry plugs out of the opposing boats, sinking them. I guess I'm just a sucker for confrontational challenges like this, I want to see it again. | S7:3:RC |
| Sorting | Weird challenge. The Survivors have a big pile of stuff that they have to sort into appropriate categories. Huh. | S5:5:IC |
| SOS Challenge | Using whatever materials are available to them, the Survivors have to construct an emergency signal visible to a plane/boat/whatever. The all-powerful and wholly objective Drop-Master and Jeff Probst use nothing but keen scientific insight to determine which tribe wins. Following the patently unfair S4 version (which came right after the Tribal Raid reward - how cheap can you get?) this seems to have been axed. I hope so, anyway. But I still want to nominate the tireless Drop-Master as the honorary 17th Survivor. | S1:4:RC S3:3:IC S4:5:IC |
| Super Challenge | A glorified obstacle course that combines some aspects of previous challenges from the series, which Jeff tediously explains. Basically a "gimme" for whoever's the least wasted-away by this point. It makes the most sense when it's linked to a Super Reward - ie, the Car and its associated Elaborate Trip or Big Feast - but sometimes it's for immunity. Never appears before Episode 12. | S2:13:RC S3:12:IC S4:12:RC S5:13:IC1 S6:12:RC S7:13:RC |
| Survival Trivia | Contestants are quizzed about a bunch of surviving-in-the-wild stuff. "If an octopus attaches itself to your head, you should…" Alternately, they answer questions about local culture, history, language, and so forth. | S1:11:RC S2:4:IC S3:6:RC S6:11:RC S7:14:IC1 |
| Target Game | Survivors try to hit their own targets to score points (unlike the Projectile Elimination challenges) and do not practice with the equipment before hand (as in Practice Then Employ.. challenges). These showed up suddenly and repeatedly in Pearl Islands; I can only assume that pirate-themed equipment was deemed (correctly) too dangerous to just hand out for practice purposes. | S7:6:RC S7:9:RC S7:12:IC |
| Tiddly-Winks | The Survivors stomp on things (CBS calls it “Stomp-Ede!”) to fling other things up into the air and try to get them into a bucket. This unbearably stupid challenge must never be brought back again, and is proof of the producers’ desperation in trying to invent new challenges for a waterless Africa environment. This challenge blows... although I'll concede that the team-based S5 variant is much better. | S3:8:RC S5:6:RC |
| Tied-Together Race | An otherwise normal relay course is jazzed up by having the tribe be all tied together, making the whole thing a race between the slowest people on each tribe. A surprisingly obvious way of encouraging the tribes to vote off the weak. | S2:3:IC S6:1:IC |
| Word Game | That's right, word games. Does this need explaining? After S3 I wrote "If MB ever has a challenge come down to a word search, a crossword, a crostic, or the Jumble again, he’ll be fired. Toast." Well, apparently I was wrong. As "mental" challenges go, these are okay, but what does proficiency with letters have to do with survival? | S3:12:RC S5:12:RC S6:5:IC S7:11:IC |
| Your Family Does Something | Any challenge where control over the outcome is completely in the hands of visiting friends/family members, which means that the outcome is essentially random in terms of spec. Unsuspenseful but sometimes funny. I accept this only insofar as it tends to control only a Family Visit - if your family controlled you getting a huge meal or Immunity that would make a mockery of the game. | S2:12:RC S4:11:RC S5:11:RC |
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