Survivor: Game Changers: Which Players Didn't Make It Past the Premiere?

Perhaps no game of Survivor has ever started off as tense as Survivor: Game Changers did tonight.

That’s no surprise, of course, given the fact that this cast is full of characters who made a big impression the first (or second) time they played the game. Everyone arrived in Fiji fully ready to start forming alliances and deciding who to keep and who’s got to go, before they even hit land. 

The funny thing was that everyone was so busy waiting for someone else to make a big move that no one was making them, meaning it took a while for anything to actually happen. Even the first challenge and tribal council went incredibly smoothly, and the Mana tribe voted Ciera out completely unanimously. 

After the first elimination, things got a little more complicated as everyone got a little more paranoid.

Before the first challenge, Jeff revealed the first big twist: in the event of a tie at tribal council, the tribe has to unanimously decide which person will go home, or both players will be declared safe and the rest of the tribe will draw rocks to see who’s going home. That wasn’t a factor at all in the first tribal council since everybody was on board with sending Ciera home, but when Nuku dominated the giant snake-filled immunity challenge once again and made Mana vote yet another person out, it was really hard to tell what might happen. 

Tony made waves from the first moments that Mana arrived at camp, running off into the forest, shouting at the top of his lungs, thinking some other idiot would chase after him. Instead, he just looked like an idiot on his own, and established himself as being a little unstable and a lot unpredictable, despite what a good physical player he was. (He also tried to dig a spy bunker?)

At first, he and Sandra (both of whom have won Survivor before) were allied with each other, and Sandra didn’t care who went home as long as it wasn’t her, but by the end of the night, Sandra had declared that Tony had to go, and organized a split of the votes between Aubry and Tony, just in case Tony had actually found an idol. 

Luckily, he hadn’t, and Tony was voted out while Sandra declared herself the queen. Whether she can keep her crown while all the big players seem to be going after each other is the real question. 

What did you think of the season premiere? Sound off in the comments!

Survivor: Game Changers airs Wednesdays at 8 p.m. on CBS.