Jefra Jabbers

[Jefra]

Hey everyone! What a fun and fast paced game this was. This game had all kinds of dips and twists and turns and memes and I really thoroughly enjoyed it through and through. Thanks to the hosts for being kick ass and for being some of the best hosts I’ve yet to experience. I’ve wanted to play Rise and Fall for a long time so I’m super grateful that I got the opportunity and even more grateful I ended up here with a spot to, hopefully, get some of y’all on board the Jefra train and put the cherry on top for me.

So at the start of this game, coming into it, I knew that I had to make some adjustments to the way that I would normally go about things. I have a tendency to play way too hard, way too fast, and be much scrappier than I need to be. I vowed to myself that I would try to play a game that put me in the safest spot possible for as long as I possibly could, and I think I succeeded at that. I had to look at my gameplay critically and see what things I do well and capitalize on those and try to leave out the behavior that normally gets me booted.

Very carefully, I was able to navigate the game (especially from the tribe swap and onwards) with tact and vigilance of what everyone else was doing; I maintained a keen sense of the relationships others had with one another and was not afraid to let others’ agenda come before my own, which is something I normally would never do and is a reason why every time before this, I’ve ended up as someone that’s been voted out of the game. I knew I had a good charm to me, and I knew I was socially aware, so I wanted to use my charm as a way to gather intel and make sound decisions on what to do each and every round without making myself a prime target.

I knew that on OG Vuku that I was perhaps not in the best spot socially. And for many days and even up until the swap, I never felt like I was at the top of anyone’s totem pole and I was scared that I was even near the bottom. I never felt that I was doomed if we lost but it did concern me. This was seen in some of the first challenges. The Vuku tribe often collaborated and followed a lead that seemed to include everyone else in roles in the challenges that put me in a spot where I took what was leftover or was excluded. But I was not afraid to step up and say that I would perform well in whatever role the challenge was calling for, and for that reason, I helped carry the Vuku tribe to win every immunity up until the swap. And even then, I played a paramount role in the physical side of the game by heavily contributing to the wins on the NuRarotonga tribe, where the only tribal council I attended premerge was the double tribal.

These wins did help me in a lot of ways because I was not forced to show my cards or play from a minority at all until the merge came, at which point I can confidently say that I also never played from behind or was in in any real danger. So although I don’t have any fierce strategic creds to put on the premerge part of the game, my social ability to make people laugh and feel comfortable and the challenge strength I had allowed me to never truly worry about if I would be leaving the game.

One key part of my gameplay was the choice that I made to put my loyalty into one person and one person only. That person was Jamal. As you’ll see in my confessional after this is all said and done, I had a really hard time feeling like anyone that I was playing with truly saw me as their number 1 or that they wanted to work closely with me. I was in a comfortable majority spot with 3 other OG Vuku members on the NuRarotonga side but I consciously made the decision based off of the conversations I had with Jamal to trust in him and play this game with him at the risk of burning the bridge that I had with the OG Vukus, and without my making of that decision, this game would have went a completely different way.

Through that decision of forming a partnership with Jamal, I was then able to see into the whole other side of the game which I had not been able to see before, and this truly was the key part of my success in this game because I suddenly had another set of eyes working for my benefit. And of course this was a two way street, because I was just as open and honest with Jamal the entire time and our dedication to loyalty and honesty put both of us here in the final 3.

However, there are some things that I think I was capable of doing that the other two sitting here lacked. My social charm helped me IMMENSELY in this game as I was able to form strong relationships with people, especially in the later part of the game, which eventually led to their demise and for me to progress. Jamal relied on me for information and to see what other people were doing many times, as did I to him. Phoebe, on the other hand, lacked that social edge and told me many times that she thought she was the next to go and applauded me for moves that I played a part in.

During the Locky vote, Jamal and I had brainstormed and both were confident that Locky had an idol, and so the plan to blindside him was born. This move has two parts to it, as Jamal and Sarah also collaborated and Sarah came to ME with the plan after Jamal and I had thought it up to see if I would be on board. I, of course, complied and voted out Locky and the vote was a success. However, Sarah did not vote Locky at that time and I then utilized that MYSELF to paint the picture that Sarah was sneaky and not able to be trusted and that what she had done was not something that others could bypass. With this information, I was able to convince that Jamal, Phoebe, and I were NOT a trio as others were labeling us as and that it was just a huge misunderstanding because of Sarah’s decision to flip back to Silas. This obviously went over well because that fear seemed to blow away with the wind and wasn’t really brought up again, although Phoebe, Jamal, and I had ALL at that time decided that it would be best to move forward together through this game.

That was a critical part of my gameplay. Defusing my relationship with Jamal by making myself seem much closer to others than I ever was to Jamal. I avoided talking about him intentionally and would do my best to always deflect things if need be so that people would not put 2 and 2 together, or in this case, 1 and 1. Multiple times the discussion about so and so being a pair and how that’s dangerous was brought up, and you guys were all right about that, because Jamal and I successfully maintained our alliance and made it all the way here together.

My personal gameplay did not ramp up until later into the season. I had a social pulse and hand on every single vote that I was involved in but I knew that trying to get EVERYTHING DONE and make EVERY MOVE and dominate the game from early on in the merge would put me in a spot like Hayden, where yes I played phenomenally, but I did too much too quickly and labeled myself as a threat. By remaining patient and letting other’s push their own agenda as long as it lined up with mine, it gave me much more wiggle room to play aggressively and give my two cents in the later part of the game. I made critical bonds with Hayden, Sarah, and Aubry, who all gave me so much information for me to take in and, much to their chagrin, use it to further myself at their own expense, which does sound murderous in a way and I know that you guys will have questions for me, but this game was all about pushing the gas when I needed to and making sure that I was never in any trouble, which I successfully did. There was never a point in this game where my head was seriously on the chopping block. The round that Zach had brought up voting me out, he left, and I think that says a lot about how I played.



Look forward to hearing from you all <3