On February 2nd, 2024, Bloomsburg Survivor had its season premiere at 8 p.m. in the Kehr Union ballroom. The evening began by introducing all 24 players and splitting them into 4 teams: Lakota, Shenango, Octoraro, and Kinzua. Once the teams were complete, one player from each team was taken to complete a challenge in a secret location with the show’s host, Jacob Dill, while the rest of the team were left in the ballroom to get to know one another. After about 15 minutes, the team members returned and the whole team challenge began.
The first challenge was called “Pop A Balloon, See Tribal Soon.” In this game, each player was given two balloons, one to tie on each ankle. Then, the teams were told to pop the balloons that are on the ankles of the other teams’ players. They were given boundaries to stay inside and the game began. The room erupted in noise as the castaways ran around, popping each other’s balloons and yelling to warn their team members about sneaky threats. Many members of Shenango got out early, leaving just one Shenango member to fend for herself. After a lot of running and jumping around, Lakota pulled out the win for this challenge, as they stuck together and seemed to focus on defending themselves instead of going after other teams.
After a quick break, the second challenge, entitled “Drop a Ball, Your Team Will Fall,” began. In this challenge, each team was given a tarp with many holes in it and five little plastic balls. The goal of the game was to keep all the balls on the tarp the longest. But if any ball fell through the holes or off the sides of the tarp, that team would be eliminated from this challenge. They started with one ball on the tarp and slowly added more as time passed. After a few minutes, Shenango began to struggle and they eventually had a ball slip through the hole in the tarp, costing them the win for this challenge. With Shenango eliminated, the other teams were on high alert, hoping to secure themselves the win. Minutes passed, and Kinzua, Octoraro, and Lakota were all fighting for the victory, even as the fifth ball was added to the tarp.
In order to spice up this challenge, the host began to call for the teams to switch places with each other, hoping this would cause another team to fall. However, all three teams successfully completed the task, causing more tasks to be introduced. Some players had to stand on one foot and the teams had to spin their tarps in a circle. The host even called for teams to remove players or have all players only hold the tarp with one hand. No matter what was thrown at them, these teams were not falling. After many minutes of these challenges, Lakota eventually fell, leaving Kinzua and Octoraro battling it out. In the end, Kinzua came out victorious in this challenge. Due to their high scores from the first two challenges, Kinzua was granted immunity from going to Tribal Council, and they did not have to compete in the final challenge.
The last challenge of the night was called “The Key to See Relies on You and Me.” This challenge was a relay race involving all players from each team, Octoraro, Shenango, and Lakota. To begin the relay, one player had to use only their mouth to search through three pies for three keys. Once they found all the keys, they had to use those keys to open a bag that was set up on the table. Upon opening the bag, they had to remove the dice from the bag and create a tower. However, in this tower, no two rows on the outside could have the same sum of the numbers. For example, if one row adds up to 10, no other row on their tower could add up to 10.
Once the host verified that they had correctly done this, two more castaways from each team, who were blindfolded, ran to the other side of the room to collect their teams’ envelopes that were placed throughout a maze of tables. One castaway from each team remained on the other side of the room and directed the two blindfolded members through the maze of tables to all the envelopes. Upon the collection of the envelopes, the two blindfolded castaways returned them to their team. The envelopes were then taken to a different location by two different castaways from each team, and the letters inside were used to create a sentence. Whichever team correctly solved the sentence first won the challenge.
In this challenge, Shenango quickly made up for their previous defeats of the night by dominating these tasks. They took their time with the beginning challenges, ensuring they had everything correct before asking for the host to check. Then they quickly and methodically cleared the table maze, opting for both teammates to stick together, instead of splitting them up as other teams were doing. Then they cheered on their team members as they solved the sentence in record time, bringing them a win for this challenge and immunity from going to tribal council this week.
Octoraro, on the other hand, struggled at first during this challenge. They couldn’t seem to clear the first stage of the race, which put them behind for the rest of the race. However, once they cleared that first leg of the race, they were on fire. They quickly gathered all their envelopes from the table maze and went on to solve the puzzle before Lakota could, making them safe from Tribal Council as well.
Lakota immediately took the lead in this challenge, finishing the first leg of the relay quickly. However, they got tripped up with the second part of the relay, where the blindfolded castaways had to maneuver tables and collect the envelopes for their team. This cost them a lot of time and ultimately set them up to have to solve the sentence very quickly if they wanted to beat Shenango. However, they just couldn’t seem to solve it fast enough, and they ended up losing this challenge. This loss meant they had to go to Tribal Council, where they voted off Aidan Mateos.
It was an eventful first week for these 24 Castaways and the game has just begun! If you can’t make it, be sure to watch the recap on the BU Student Involvement Instagram page and read the update posted here on The Voice to stay up to date with the game.
