Seven Seas

**SurviVARs: Seven Seas** is the fourth season of *SurviVARs*. It had 18 new castaways marooned for 44 days. It premiered March 12th 2022 and the winner was crowned April 24th 2022.

## Production

This season of *SurviVARs* had 18 castaways divided into three tribes of six. The game lasted 44 days but if someone had to quit or be ejected tribal council would be cancelled.

## Twists/Changes

* **Isla De Muerta -** The winning tribe would vote to send one of their members to Isla De Muerta, where they could accept various “curses” in order to earn advantages and idol clues.
* **Isla Cruces -** The players eliminated prior to the merge had the opportunity to battle each other for a chance to join the jury.
* **Brethren Court -** All three tribes went to a joint Tribal Council together, and each player competed for individual immunity. The two winning players also became “Captains”, and were given the power to draft the swapped tribes.

## Season Ranking (6th)

**Cast - 6/6**

Seven Seas was not a bad cast! In fact, it included some of my favorite people in the ORG community, and produced some of my all-time favorite SurviVARS players. That being said, though, the cast had more than a few duds. If I had to name the pre-merge bootlist off of the top of my head, I think I’d actually forget a player or two unless I checked my notes, and I can’t say that for any other season. The players who made the merge were pretty excellent, but the confessionals of this season left something to be desired. This season also had the whole Derek situation, which I don’t love talking about but definitely hurts this season. So while I really love so many of this season’s great players, it still lands at the bottom of my rankings.

**Pre-Merge - 6/6**

I’ll be honest… Seven Seas had a really bad pre-merge. Like I said, I don’t even remember all of the players without checking my notes. We had a lot of inactive players get booted, had a quit right off the bat, and only one vote that was moderately interesting thanks to Winston playing his idol. Top this all off with the flop Isla Cruces twist, and it was just all-around disappointing. Only two players really cared to stick around and fight for a jury position, so while I think the idea is cool in practice this just wasn’t the right season for it. The pre-merge had no real narrative or storyline aside from Winston and Maya scraping their way through as underdogs. I don’t dislike Seven Seas as a whole, but I can’t say I enjoyed the pre-merge.

**Post-Merge - 5/6**

The merge game of Seven Seas was soooo much better than the pre-merge. Overall, I genuinely enjoyed this part of the game. None of our seasons had bad post-merges, which is unfortunate for Seven Seas because we had four really good ones which leaves this towards the bottom of rankings again. I think that Seven Seas had our most unpredictable post-merge game, which at times made it really fun to watch. Unfortunately, this chaos wasn’t matched with clear confessionals, so we barely ever knew what was happening. I still couldn’t tell you exactly why Nick P., Maya, or Lex went home. The rock draws added a LOT of fun to the season, and stand out as some of the best Tribal Councils this ORG has seen. I also think that the Final Three is the most competitive that we’ve had, where any player would’ve deserved the win. Nick beating Suzz (the puzzle queen) at firemaking was a great final moment for the season, and a pretty solid merge cast really redeemed Seven Seas after a rough start.

**Gameplay - 4/6**

I think that the gameplay in Seven Seas, especially from the best players, was pretty solid. What holds it back is the lack of clarity in so many of the moves. There were only a few players who consistently gave good confessionals that clarified what was happening in the game, but the season was too chaotic for one person to sum it up. This was a game played in DM’s and not played in alliance chats or confessionals, which made it hard for the spectators to follow, but does not detract from how well so many of these players ran the game. We had players like Suzz and Kristine, who weaponized social connections to make deep runs without targets on their backs. We had the dastardly duo of BK and Winston who wielded chaos like a flamethrower and just set the game on fire so that they could escape tough situations. Then you had Nick W., the pirate king with a chest full of advantages that he used pretty much perfectly to earn his way to the end. I fully believe that this cast was full of great players, I just wish I could back it up with more concrete evidence from confessionals.

**Story - 6/6**

Despite all of the stellar gameplay, I can’t pinpoint the story of Seven Seas for the life of me. There were some fun arcs like Winston’s underdog story, Nick W.’s scrappy escapes, and BK’s refusal to ever play a normal or predictable game. Unfortunately, that’s sort of where it ends. The season had fun moments and a few strong storylines, but they never amounted to an overall narrative to define the season. Just like the gameplay, the story was too chaotic to really pin down. It’s not that the story was bad, it’s just that it didn’t really exist in the first place.

**Hosting Experience - 6/6**

Seven Seas was pretty unlucky in this regard. It was the season I hosted when I was at my busiest with other commitments, so it was harder to give it the attention it deserved. Thanks to its really rocky start, that also kept me from investing in this season as much as its predecessors. I also think Seven Seas was hurt by coming off the heels of Magic Kingdom, which was like lightning in a bottle. To go from the high of MK to the low of the Seven Seas pre-merge really hurt my overall enjoyment of the season, I think. I’ll say it again: I do not think that Seven Seas was a bad season. But it was also the season I enjoyed least when I compare it to all the others.

**Overall Thoughts**

Overall, Seven Seas is a mixed bag. It’s not a bad season, but it suffers because we’ve had five other seasons that were all pretty stellar in their own ways. Nothing about Seven Seas really sets it apart from the rest of the pack, so it ends up being more forgettable than the rest of SurviVARS’s seasons. Also, while I tried to ignore this in the other write-ups, I have to address how much the Derek situation hurt this season for me. It left a bad taste in my mouth and made me question my ability as a host that I know isn’t fair to myself. Still, for all of the things that didn’t really work, I want to praise Seven Seas for what it had: A really strong merge cast, great gameplay from the halfway point onwards, and some of the best moments of chaos we’ll ever have in this ORG. It’s pieces may not add up to a success story, but it doesn’t mean that those pieces don’t each hold value of their own.