Room Escape Artist

“I’ll go count the votes”

Location: at home

Date Played: Summer 2025

Team Size: 3-6; we recommend 4-6

Duration: 30-60 minutes

Price: about $20

REA Reaction

I’ve never been shy about being a Survivor fan. It’s the only network show that I have watched in many years, and my podcast co-host is two-time Survivor player Peih-Gee Law. I think that Survivor is a fascinating, complex, and entertaining game. It is extremely difficult to capture using tabletop game mechanics because at home you’re not playing it while starving on an island, surrounded by cameras (unless your home life is very different from mine.)

I’ll also be up front that I am old friends with Elan Lee, co-founder of Exploding Kittens (the publisher of this game.) He has appeared twice on Reality Escape Pod, and most recently, he gave us the scoop that this game was coming. Elan had informed us that Survivor’s Jeff Probst had driven the design of this game, and that it was as close to Survivor on the tabletop as they could create. I was skeptical right up until I was halfway through playing this game.

Survivor: The Tribe Has Spoken substituted all of the discomfort of playing Survivor in real life with game mechanics that forced everyone to play hard and aggressively. There was no place to hide in Survivor: The Tribe Has Spoken. Turns were fast, and every single person’s turn made them take direct action against another player. The question is, what will you do with that? How will you make the aggression work for you when you still have to work with the people at the table in order to get to the end of the game? And at the end, if you’re one of the final two, you need the other players to vote you the winner.

Survivor: The Tribe Has Spoken had some genius game design packed into it, and that’s not even getting into the magnificent game box that doubled as the “voting urn” during Tribal Council.

My big callout on Survivor: The Tribe Has Spoken is that due to the mechanics that force everyone to take real action against one another, I strongly suggest only taking this game out with a group where everyone in the room can play it with some level of mutual respect (for each other and the game). It doesn’t matter if you’ve never seen Survivor, or you’ve watched every single episode of US Survivor (plus all of the International variants), Survivor: The Tribe Has Spoken is simply a great game. It’s just a game that demands that the players respect each other enough to play hard without being a baby.

(Also… where is the Peih-Gee Law player card? Give this icon her damn card.)

Who is this for?

• Tabletop gamers looking for an aggressive and quick game
• Survivor fans

Why play?

• Intense and fast Survivor-inspired play
• Fantastic product design
• Great rules presentation

Story

Survivor: The Tribe Has Spoken is a card-based recreation of the iconic reality TV show Survivor.

For those who are less familiar with modern Survivor, it is not the catty mess that makes up so much of reality TV; Survivor is an intensely strategic game that is extremely demanding of its players.

Designed by Survivor host and producer Jeff Probst in collaboration with Exploding Kittens, Survivor: The Tribe Has Spoken can’t replicate the deprivation of living on an island with essentially nothing. However, it does faithfully recreate the intensity of enduring the scheming of cunning competitors.

Setup & Gameplay

At its core, Survivor: The Tribe Has Spoken is a card game where players take turns randomly stealing cards from their opponents. These cards represent knowledge, power, and resources (even remembering what was stolen from you is important.)

After a period of time, a Tribal Council happens, and each person has to cast votes to knock a player out of the game. The catch is that each person has two player cards (which you can think of as two lives.) This was helpful from a game balancing standpoint in so many ways, including the removal of the turn one elimination problem that plagues a lot of social deduction games. It also created some interesting dynamics surrounding who still had two players cards versus one player card.

Exploding Kittens makes some of the finest instructions and tutorials, so I will let this video narrated by Survivor’s Jeff Probst explain the course of play:

There was an impressive range of ways to play and outcomes both within individual games, and between games.

Analysis

➕ From a game design perspective, Survivor: The Tribe Has Spoken was an extremely clever design. It was essentially a game engine that forced fast, competitive, and aggressive play. Not only did the game give each player permission to play hard; it forced the issue.

➕ The choice to have each player represent two different characters added a lot to the game. This allowed the game to feel like there were a bunch of people in the tribe, and also functioned as “two lives” for each individual player.

➕ The game’s components were beautiful. The box doubled as the voting urn; it was a magnificent bit of product design.

➖ The “Knowledge Is Power” card played the same as the “Knowledge Is Power” advantage in Survivor (the TV show)… but the timing of when you play that card was different from the advantage. This one change caused me to make a minor fool of myself in-game. Survivor fans, don’t forget to fully read your cards.

➖ There was a set of “inheritance” cards that allowed a player to steal all of the cards from the hand of a player who was just voted out. I see what these cards were going for, and did get it to work once (but for a reward that wasn’t fully worth the effort). At almost all times, any inheritance card felt like a dead card in my hand. Playing without them could speed up the game.

➕ Exploding Kittens always makes understandable, concise rules with accompanying videos. Survivor: The Tribe Has Spoken had the most complex rule set that I have seen in an Exploding Kittens’ game, but it was still clear and easy to learn.

➕ I found an incredible amount of strategic depth within Survivor: The Tribe Has Spoken. It allowed me to take inspiration from the show itself. I found myself able to cook up new approaches to surviving my fellow competitors.

❓ This was an inherently aggressive game, and I don’t believe that everyone is emotionally equipped to play it in a mature way. If you have any friends or family who can’t handle action being taken against them in a game, they are going to either experience some emotional growth or cause a problem while playing Survivor: The Tribe Has Spoken. This is one of the many ways, that this game brilliantly represents Survivor.

😝 Why no Peih-Gee Law player card?

Tips For Players

• Space Requirements: A table that can comfortably seat all players
• Required Gear: none

Buy your copy of Exploding Kitten’s Survivor: The Tribe Has Spoken, and tell them that the Room Escape Artist sent you.

Disclosure: Exploding Kittens provided a sample for review.

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