The Next Season of Survivor Comes With a Fun Twist

The next season of Survivor is going to come with some serious payoff for fans who’ve watched all 18 years and 35 seasons of the groundbreaking reality series (*author sheepishly raises her hand*). This season will come with a new twist, and one that should make the game extra interesting for die-hard fans of the franchise.

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Season 36 is Survivor: Ghost Island, and it will feature a literal island covered with relics from Survivor past. Only these aren’t just any relics; all 82 of them are actual items from past shows. To add another even more fun twist, each item should have given a contestant an advantage, but instead, it led to him or her getting voted off. This season, contestants have the opportunity to find these “cursed” items and use them, hopefully correctly this time.

“These are the real items and getting them was not always easy,” host Jeff Probst told Entertainment Weekly. “When somebody opens up an idol or an advantage, they are going to be holding that exact idol that the player misplayed. So it could be as recently as last season and it could be as far back as a decade ago.”

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These items were kept by the players who misplayed them originally, and Probst assured EW that this season, they’re just being borrowed.

“We have made an agreement that all items will be returned to their original owner,” he said.

It’s a really interesting new twist, and while details are still a little scarce, it sounds like players will have the opportunity to go to Ghost Island to look for these “cursed” relics. Whether Ghost Island is a place of exile for players who lose challenges (a point of game play that’s been used in the past) is still unclear.

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“The fun of this game is that we have people who grew up on it and are now playing it and they will be able to say ‘Oh my gosh, this is an actual relic — the real deal, not a replica, not a fake,'” Probst said. “And then the reality will set back in, which is, ‘I have it. What do I do with it? And I’ve got to play it correctly because now, more than ever, I’m aware that one bad decision can screw your game up.'”

Survivor: Ghost Island premieres Wednesday, Feb. 28.