‘RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars’ 8 Ruvealed: What Are the Fame Games? (2024)

RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars is all about the twists, turns, goops, and gags. Every single season has featured some twist that’s completely upended the game (teams, All Star Rules, the jury vote, the first LaLaPaRUza, Lip Sync Assassins, the “game within a game,” the points system) and Season 8 is no different. All Stars 8 is bringing us the Fame Games —but what are the Fame Games? Isn’t life a fame game, when you think about it? Drag Race was predictably cryptic in the run-up to All Stars 8, but now that the two-part premiere is available to stream on Paramount+, we know what the Fame Games are all about.

SPOILERS AHEAD!

What are the Fame Games on RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars Season 8?

As RuPaul tells the queens at the beginning of the episode, there are two ways to win this season of All Stars. And finally, after the runway portion, RuPaul spills the tea on all things Fame Games. Here’s what we know!

First of all: All Stars rules are in effect, with the Lip Sync assassin twist. We’re back to the format that we previously saw in Seasons 5 and 6. The winner of the week picks a bottom queen to go home. The rest of the queens vote on who should go home. The winner then lip syncs against a Lip Sync Assassin. If the winner wins the lip sync, then the queen they chose goes home. If the assassin wins the lip sync, then the queen that the other queens voted to get the chop goes home. So, that’s that.

The Fame Games come into play after a queen is eliminated. RuPaul says that all season long, the runway looks that would have been worn by the eliminated queens will be shown as part of RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars: Untucked. That means that over the course of the season, we will get to see every single look that every single queen prepared for every single runway, and that goes for the very first queen eliminated all the way to the last queen cut before the finale. And at the end of the season, every queen will be judged by the fans —fans who will have gotten to see everything that all of the queens prepared for their All Stars run. This also includes whatever social media content the queens post during this time period, too. And with all of that taken into consideration, there will be a vote to determine who wins the title of Queen of the Fame Games and a prize of $50,000.

This is great because the queens spend so much money on runway looks that they’ve been making sure those looks get seen by sharing them on social media. On top of showing off the looks they would have worn, queens have long used their elimination week as the launch date for all kinds of content, from singles to lip sync videos to merchandise. This is a tradition that goes all the way back to when Latrice Royale and Manila Luzon were given the chop on All Stars 1 and then released their single, “The Chop.” More recent examples include Denali’s “Chicago Drag Excellence” video from Season 13, which was released after her and Kahmora Hall’s iconic “100% Pure Love” lip sync aired, and Marcia Marcia Marcia’s “Footloose” video from earlier this year. Now all of this content will be part of the season’s narrative and could potentially win the queen $50K.

Of course there are still a lot of questions about how all of this will play out, like how Drag Race will highlight all that extra online content, how voting will go down, when voting will go down, and how — or even if — Drag Race can prevent this from becoming Miss Fan Favorite-gate 2.0: The Shequel. Those questions will be answered in time!

As for the first round of The Fame Games, you can stream the first episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars: Untucked on Paramount+ right now.