Survivor is the most exciting format in sports; there’s nothing quite like the pressure of a single pick deciding your season. But a great contest needs more than just high stakes; it needs the right rules to match your group's personality. Whether you want a brutal test of skill or a more forgiving weekly game, Splash puts the power in your hands. We provide the full suite of custom skill settings every commissioner needs to build the exact Survivor experience you want, giving you control over how your contest plays out.

The Short Version
  • NFL, college, or both. One Survivor contest, with entrants picking from either league each week.
  • You set the difficulty. Team Use Limit can be set at 1 or moved up to unlimited.
  • Straight Up or Against the Spread. Pick winners outright, or use a spread for a harder contest.
  • Real forgiveness options. Extra lives, a once-a-season Bye Pick, Auto Picks, and revivals after a wipeout week.
  • You decide the ending. Split the win among everyone left standing by default, or turn on a tiebreaker stack for a single champion.
  • Almost everything is editable mid-season. This includes Team Use Limit and how the contest ends.
  • Contest Vault. Built through a direct integration with LeagueSafe, commissioners can now collect, hold, and pay out entry fees in one place. Learn more

Here's the full range, and when each setting is worth using.

NFL, College, or Both

New this year, a commissioner decides whether a contest runs NFL only, college football only, or NFL and college combined, with members picking from either league each week in one contest.

Decide How Hard the Contest Is to Win

The two settings that do the most to define a Survivor contest are Pick Type and Team Use Limit.

Pick Type is the classic choice: pick teams to win, or invert the contest so entrants pick the team they think will lose — meaning a win eliminates them. Most groups run the standard win version. The invert format is a deliberate change of pace for a group that's run standard Survivor before and wants something different.

Team Use Limit controls how many times across the season an entry can pick the same team. Once (the classic Survivor constraint), twice, three, four or five times, or unlimited. This is the single biggest lever for difficulty. A once-only limit forces real season-long planning; a higher limit makes the contest more forgiving and easier for casual players to stay alive.

Straight Up or Against the Spread

Scoring Basis sets whether picks are graded on who wins the game (Straight Up) or against the spread (Against the Spread, using either Splash's own spread or a spread the commissioner sets manually). Straight Up only cares who wins, the default and the simpler version. Against the Spread requires covering a point spread to survive, which raises the skill ceiling for a group that wants Survivor to have an extra edge.

Build In a Second Chance or Don't

Entry Lives sets how many losses an entry can survive before elimination, from 1 to multiple lives. A commissioner can also set a cutoff to stop issuing extra lives after a given week, so mulligans are available early in the season but not late, when they'd matter most for separating the field.

Auto Picks handles what happens when an entrant misses the deadline. It's off by default in Survivor, meaning a missed pick costs a life the moment the deadline passes, unless a Bye Pick is available. Turning Auto Picks on gives every entrant a season-long cap on automatic picks (unlimited by default) before missed picks start costing lives, and a commissioner decides whether the auto-pick logic is set once for the whole contest or chosen individually by each entrant.

Bye Pick is a simpler, separate setting: one free pass per entrant per season that's used automatically the first time they miss a pick.

Contest Revivals is the setting for the worst-case week: if every remaining entry gets eliminated in the same week, this setting brings the whole field back with their pick history intact instead of ending the contest early. It's off by defaul, and when turned off a wipeout week ends the contests and resolves through a contest split or tiebreaker settings. The commissioner does have control through the Entrant Manager to support one-off entrant revivals or buybacks at any point in the season, separate from this setting.

Additional Pick Settings

Pick-Against Team Limit caps how often an entry can select the opponent of the same team, which stops an entire contest from fading one bad team over and over.

Multi-Pick Weeks, including Flexible Multi-Picks, which automatically convert a week into a multi-pick week once too many entries are still alive, force entrants to pick 2 to 4 teams correctly in a single week instead of one. Both are built for large contests where the standard format isn't thinning the field fast enough.

Decide How It Ends

By default, Survivor ends in a co-winner split; every entry still alive at the finish shares the win, regardless of how they got there. A commissioner who wants a single winner instead can turn on a tiebreaker. Commissioners can turn on a tiebreaker stack: an ordered set of rules (most weeks survived, closest to a championship-game total, strength of victory or point spread differential) which will resolve ties down to one winner.

Team Standings for Group and Office Contests

Groups splits entrants into named subgroups, department versus department, family versus family, with standings that can be filtered by group on top of the individual leaderboard. It's off by default and works the same way in Survivor as it does in Pick'em.

What Your Contestants See

None of these settings require anything from entrants beyond making their weekly pick. Standings always rank alive entries above eliminated ones, and most settings show up as constraints on the picksheet itself, so entrants see the effect of a commissioner's setup without needing it explained separately.

What Happens If a Game Gets Cancelled

Postponed, suspended, and cancelled games are all treated the same way. If the game is cancelled before kickoff, your pick stays editable until the pick deadline, so you can simply switch to another game. If it is cancelled after kickoff, or you don't switch before the deadline, the pick counts as a loss. Auto Picks never select a cancelled game.

Survivor settings will be live soon, and nearly all of them can still be adjusted after the contest starts.