Hi there, r/JetLagTheGame! After the positive reception of my after-action report of our first time playing the Home Edition back in May, I wanted to also share how our second game went.

Just like last time, I'll tell the story from my perspective, but add some additional stuff we didn't know at the time as spoilers, so you can alternatively also read this report from an all-knowing perspective.

Game changes

In my first post I outlined the map we're playing, the changes we made to the base game rules and the game materials (i.e., maps) that I prepared in advance. Most of that is still the same, so read up on the first report to get a broader introduction. You can also find a transit diagram of the valid stations there.

Following our learnings from last time, we made some adjustments to the rules and the deck:

• This time, we started from the central rail station Linz Hauptbahnhof. This meant that essentially the whole map was in play for the first team.
• Thanks to the summer break we managed to play on a weekday, meaning the frequency of most lines was a bit higher than last time.
• We extended the hiding time back to the original 30min defined in the rules, but kept our rule of the timer only starting once the actual first connection shows up at the station to avoid being stranded somewhere with bad connections.
• We extended the hiding zones back to a 400m radius
• To avoid overengineered strategies, teams were still only given 15min planning time (up from 10min, as that was too brief) before starting to coordinate their run
• I went ahead and bought the Expansion pack and we boosted the deck by replacing some less interesting curses and weaker cards with a bunch of new curses, more powerful time bonuses and stronger powerups. >!Only very little of that actually showed up though. My team would only see 2 of those cards and pick 1!<
• To enhance the map replayability a bit and to avoid that always the same questions would be asked each game, the hiders started their runs with a Veto card already in their hand.
• We added a rule that you could clear "impossible" curses that would derail the game by taking a time penalty according to the following formula: Penalty = 10min + (20min - minimum([minutes since start of curse], 20min)). This way, you always are encouraged to at least try to clear any curse for at least 20 minutes, but have an emergency exit from a situation that would drag the game on for too long. In the end, it never came up during this round.

This time, we had 3 returning players and 3 new players, distributed among 2 teams of 3 players each. We shuffled players so that nobody had the same teammates as last time. Again, we played a single hiding round for each team, and also followed our tradition of taking a proper 30-45min lunch break between games.

>!The other team had the distinct advantage of having a player who over-prepared enough delicious food for twice as many people, so they were in the Snack Zone for the whole first round, essentially. Still, plenty of left-overs were available once we found them.!<

The dice decided once more that it would be my team to start seeking, so on a Thursday with near-perfect weather (we had just survived the 40°C heatwave a few days before), it was time to get going.

Round 1 - Seeking

If you have read my previous report, you know that my team lost by a significant margin. This was partially due to us playing in a very cautious manner, looking to never have to significantly backtrack. This time, also thanks to the starting position and frequency, we decided to play more aggressively. At 9:00 the game started, and seconds later we hopped on a tram towards the south of the city. We strongly expected them to be somewhere in the south, because it was the part of the map that was never played on last time and both teams didn't have any inherent "local guide" advantage there. We simultaneously asked for a photo of a building visible from their station and started checking transit connections to figure out if we could exclude any stations as unreachable. Turns out, not very much, at least with decent certainty.

We quickly received the photo back, showing a residential building. While looking distinct, you could find this kind of blocky building pretty much anywhere in Linz.

Building visible from transit station

We immediately followed with the question if we shared the same nearest hospital as them. We then got off the tram at Turmstraße, as it is the last interchange station served for a while, in case we needed to change directions. Luckily, we didn't need to, as the hospital question came back as a confirmation that we were on the right track:

Game Map after 2 questions

>!Remember that the maps I'm showing here are digital with near perfect precision. While playing, we were working with much fuzzier lines and angles and had to add safety buffers around everything because hiders could have theoretically moved up to 400m from their station to flip the response. Combined, this caused our map to have a more conservative boundary, where the cluster on the west of the map around Buchberg was still in play.!<

Good first question, we thought. What we now wanted to was to get a west/east split to have one tram branch to focus on. We ended up moving a few more stations further south and asked about the proximity to a cinema there. We actually missed our intended stop, because we didn't realize that it was on request only and nobody pushed the button.>! In the end, that was advantageous for us because it removed more than it otherwise would have.!<

The answer came back as further away, which was great news! We were only 3 questions and 35 minutes in, but the remaining map was reduced considerably and we were most likely still going the right direction. My best guess at this point was something in the Ebelsberg district, because a member of the opposing team had mentioned how nice it looked and how she wanted to visit at some point. Maybe we could finish this in record time?

Game Map after 3 questions

To split between Ebelsberg/Pichling and the rest of the map, we asked about the proximity to a golf course. This is where the hiders decided to play the Veto they started with. Not a huge problem, we thought, there are plenty of other ways to slice this.

We got on the tram again that was going south to SolarCity. We started a 1km thermometer at Simonystraße, looking to do an alternative, relatively neat 50/50 split of the remaining map. This is where the hiders used their second veto they must have drawn from a previous question. Lucky them. Together with having to re-plan twice, this cost us more than half an hour. We got off at Ebelsberg without new information.

We wanted to test if Ebelsberg was the right city district, but first we asked if we shared the same museum. We did indeed, so we could remove a handful of stations east and a remaining sliver of stations to the northwest of us.

>!In hindsight and when reviewing the digital maps, this question wasn't that smart. The northwest sliver, which looked on our paper map as if it still had around 5-10 stations in it, did in fact not exist at all. The angle of the lines we drew for the hospital question were a bit off and the radius regarding the cinemas was drawn slightly too small.!<

Game map after 4 answered questions

Alright, down to a cluster here in Ebelsberg, a cluster north of the river in Auwiesen, and a few stragglers on the slicing edges. We considered our options again. Ever less convinced of Ebelsberg considering our surroundings and satellite imagery (either old-town style, single-home residential units or smaller apartment buildings with less than 4 floors), we crossed the river by foot and thus also the city district, and asked if they also were in Auwiesen. Assuming a yes, we moved towards the nearest Tram stop we hadn't seen yet in case we needed to turn around and they weren't here.

Neither was the case. We got hit with a randomize (to same consulate, which was absolutely pointless information). Lucky them. We walked to Dürerstraße and took a tram down to the terminal tram stop of Auwiesen, visually ruling out all intermediate stops along the way. from there, a custom 1.6km radar would finally bring clarity. Except that it didn't. The hiders used their third veto card (which I believe means they drew all that are in the deck?). Lucky them indeed. After our expression of frustration and their reassurance that multiple people had shuffled the deck properly, we found an alternative and asked if the same library matched. Which was randomized again into the nearest mountain (=useless). It was now 11:10, the remaining map looked almost exactly like it did more than 1.5 hours ago, and you can probably imagine our faces at this point.

We then finally realized that a randomize doesn't eliminate the originally intended question, so we asked about the matching city district again. Finally, we received the confirmation that we were close.

Game map after 5 (7) answered questions

Finally, the pace of our search picked up again. There were only 6 stations left in play, and from satellite we ruled out most of them. The two adjacent stations Enenkelstraße and Flötzerweg looked most promising, so we went to closer of the two. On the way, we spent a few minutes investigating a local park that looked like a prime hiding spot, but nothing came from it. Once there, the distinct building facade was easily confirmed and we were finally in the end game about 2h30min into the game. We requested the tallest structure they could see, receiving a grainy, super zoomed-in image of some park benches.

Tallest manmade structure \"visible\" from their hiding spot.

With that the woods / nature area north of us were really the only option left, and we found them in a straightforward manner.

A total hiding time of 2h45m plus 24 minutes of time bonuses meant their final time was 3 hours and 9 minutes. Pretty good, but roughly the duration we'd have assumed for an average run.

We had lunch together and soon afterwards it was time for my team to start our 15 minutes of planning time.

Round 2 - Hiding

Immediately, we realized that we had a horrible starting position. The first bus was going in the direction we just came from and not very far, plus it was delayed. Making any non-frequent connections was too risky. The other direction would have usually been more attractive, but that would mean just standing here for 10 minutes, a third of our total hiding time. By either making tight connections or running at the end to reach something by foot, we could probably only reach about a quarter of the map at all.

>!When writing this, I checked and it would have been closer to about half of stations, but that's still a far worse position than the other team started in.!<

In the end, we took that delayed bus, transferred to a tram back to the city center and moved a bit by foot to reach Mariendom, a station just about as far away as we could have gotten and not on the main transit corridor through the Old Town. Not great, not terrible, we thought.

The first question we got was the photo of the building at the station. Shit. There was only one building visible that was not screaming Habsburg at you, and that one had the trolley bus wires visible, which would have been a huge giveaway. We thus immediately played our Veto, something we were willing to do and somewhat expected. We also believed it wasn't a huge loss, because that's probably the best question to veto anyway.

>!As you'll see, this veto was absolutely life-saving for our run and the best choice we could have possibly made.!<

We went around searching for a suitable hiding spot. The zone unfortunately offered less variety than expected, and the few better options we found we would have not been overly comfortable staying at because we'd be squatting in front of some private building entrance or the like.

Meanwhile, they asked for the distance to hospital. We obviously were closer (our station is right in front of the nearest, in fact), which gave them a direction to towards. They were now moving north towards the Old town, but still quite a bit away.

Game map after first question. The majority of stations are already excluded.

We drew the Curse of the Mediocre Travel agent. Good enough card, but we couldn't play it right now because they needed to be off-transit for that. We continued looking for a hiding spot, and checked out the insides of a shopping mall that was mapped with pedestrian paths on Google Maps. A cafe just outside in a backyard seemed attractive. When we checked the tracker again we saw that they had moved all the way to the central railway station!

>!We assumed they were already confident that we were in the city center and that's why they skipped half the remaining zone, but actually they had intended to get off at Turmstraße, so way sooner than that, but were so deep in discussion they missed the spot and got off the tram at Hauptbahnhof for the connectivity.!<

They asked if they were in the same district as us. They were just barely, but we had to confirm that they were.

Considering this, we believed our run would be very short-lived and we just locked in on this cafe as our hiding spot. We're not going to win this anyway, so might as well be comfortable. Hopefully it would get us over the 2 hour mark.

In our mind, there was very little feasible area and very few stops remaining.

Game map after second question

>!As you can see on the digital map, it wasn't quite so bad as we assumed. Still, with just 2 actually answered questions they had us down to a dozen stations or so.!<

Next, they asked if the nearest consulate matched. This was not the case. It was at this point we cursed them with the Travel Agent, and sent them back to Unionskreuzung to take a vacation at a casino.

We felt quite good about this, because it was on the other side of the railway tracks, so they effectively had to take transit to get there despite only being 500m away from them.

>!It turns out that the "casino" in question is perhaps the most shady gambling machine hall in town, and they brought us back an abandoned can of an energy drink back as a souvenir. They described their 5 minute stay in front of that casino as most unpleasant afterwards.!<

The \"casino\" in question.

The trip to the casino delayed them by about 20 minutes, so overall a pretty good curse. Meanwhile, we had drawn the curse of the jammed door from answering that question about the consulate, which we kept on hand for now.

Having only half the old town left to go, they took their last tram to get to Mozartkreuzung and disembarked there. While it was not our selected spot, it was in our zone, so the endgame had begun. Soon afterwards they asked for a photo of the widest street (returned a null answers, confirming to them as well that they are in the endgame now). They asked for a selfie and started checking out probable hiding spots in their surroundings. Our photo was relatively easily identifiable as some backyard and maybe some cafe/restaurant, so they continued by foot and seemed to intensify their search, which should turn out to be quite a long one.

>!Because of the vetoed photo from the transit station, they had no method of narrowing down which hiding zone they should actually search. They only knew that it must be the 400 meters around one of the stations which in turn was within 400 meters from their position. In the dense city center, that barely narrowed it down.!<

Selfie from our hiding spot

>!They correctly identified that the shop behind us was a pretty fancy women's clothing shop because of the dress in the window, and that's mostly what guided their search across town. They also initially believed to recognize the cafe we were at, which turned out to be incorrect.!<

They wandered around the city for almost 50 minutes before stopping right in front of one of the entrances of our shopping center. We never ended up using the curse of the jammed door because it would have been too much of a give-away. We believed the run to be over, but in fact they stopped there to ask for a 300m custom radar. We decided to randomize the question, and from the messages exchanged also realized that part of their team was taking a bathroom break inside the shopping center, barely 20 meters away from us!

Seeker's bathroom break in the same shopping center

by pure luck, they didn't see us. If they had entered from another direction, it would have ended then and there. From that randomized question (a 2km radius, utterly pointless for them as well) we got to draw a 20 minute time bonus, one of the powerful expansion deck cards (would be worth 60 minutes in a large game). That brought our times dangerously close together. After the randomize they did the same question again with 200 meters, which was a hit as we were at opposing sides of the same building. Nonetheless, they walked away from us, even checking out a *different* shopping center first. We were relieved how lucky we were with our spot, this could have been over much sooner.

All good things must come to an end though, and soon afterwards we got caught. The other team ended up taking almost 1.5 hours for the endgame alone.

Seeker's GPS tracker during the endgame. path sums up to about 3.7 kilometers. Nice hike!

With a hiding time of 2h37min plus 28 minutes of time bonus we ended up with a photo finish of 3 hours and 5 minutes, a worthy second place with just 4 minutes of difference. Literally any other move would have made the difference here. We ended the game day over well-deserved drinks at that bar. A waitress was very curious about what we were up to and very amazed of the game once we explained the concept to her.

Overall, a very fun day with lots of ups, downs and drama for both sides.

Take-home messages

I have less take-away messages than last time, most points from my previous report still stand. Most feedback we've collected afterwards were minor changes and useful additions to the paper maps, such as more clearly visualized information which label belongs to which station and showing abbreviated station names on the POI map. There's still a few points though:

• Boosting the deck with more powerful cards was a good idea. Both teams were lucky with what they drew in their own right.
• There are many strategies for this game. Hiding in a super dense zone can shorten your early game dramatically, but it *might* give you a very powerful endgame. On a small map where the early game is by its nature relatively brief compared to the larger variants, this makes for very powerful spots.
• The starting veto certainly helped variety and makes some spots that have a single obvious weakness more interesting. Still, the game map as it stands right probably only has 1-2 games left in it before it will start to feel repetitive. We might have to come up with other networks soon.
• It might be time for custom curses in our next round.

Hope you had an entertaining read! I'd appreciate your suggestions for custom curses suitable to Austria/Linz down in the comments, if you have any.

Stay tuned for further reports sometimes later down the line!

After months of deliberation, my girlfriend and I finally decided to buy the Home Game and assemble friends to play this game for ourselves in Linz, Austria. Here's a little after-action report on how I prepared the game, what the map looked like, and how the match itself went.

The Players

We played the game with a total of six people, divided into two teams of 3 players each. My girlfriend and I are long-time viewers and went into opposing teams, each of us joined by two of our friends, who have seen a handful of episodes of the show at most. In the end, we struck a pretty good balance in each team between knowledge about the game and knowledge about the city itself. I'm a huge cartography nerd and a long-time OpenStreetMap editor, so I took care of the pre-game preparations.

The Map

Linz is a horrendous city. ~ My former math professor.

As most of you have probably never heard of this city before, let me give you a quick tour! Linz is the capital of the state of Upper Austria and Austria's 3rd largest city, with about 210k inhabitants. It is perhaps Austria's most industrial city, and is sometimes nicknamed "Die Stahlstadt" (The Steel City). Still, some parts of the city are genuinely quite nice. The city's official tourism slogan is "Take a risk, visit Linz!", which just about sums it up.

Like Austria's much better-known first and fourth largest cities, Vienna and Salzburg, it also sits on the Danube river. The centrally located Old Town architecturally screams "Austria-Hungary" and "Habsburgs" at you with a passion. The river splits off a small, mostly quite nice section called Linz Urfahr that consists mostly of residential areas towards the north. The river then bends southwards and, on the city's eastern edge, a huge area with a cargo port and lots of heavy industry follows the riverbed. Towards the west, there are somewhat prettier residential districts up in the hills. Towards the south-east and south, the city sprawls into endless residential and retail areas and also directly into the surrounding suburban towns of Leonding and Traun for another 10 kilometers or so along the major highways.

Linz is dominated by huge infrastructure and oversized roads, an Autobahn goes straight through the city. For long-distance transit, Linz is located on Austria's Weststrecke railway and is very well connected. You can get to both Salzburg and Vienna in just a little over an hour with at least four trains running per hour and direction. Locally however, you can generally get almost anywhere twice as fast by car compared to public transport.

Speaking of which: For a European city of its size, its public transit system is remarkably weak, having only 4 regular tram lines that are also, in reality, more like a handful of branches off a shared central corridor across the Old Town. We also have the lovely Pöstlingbergbahn, which is another tram line going up the "mountain" of the same name, but that's more of a touristy service (there are tourists in Linz?), having also the novelty of being one of the steepest tram lines in the world. Using only these tram lines would have made for a quite limited map and a boring game, so we decided to expand it by also including most bus lines, which are much more developed and criss-cross all around town.

We ended up with the following rules for inclusion:

• Must be a tram or bus stop (intentionally excluding the handful of railway stations)
• Must be served by the local transport agency, i.e., not just by regional bus lines
• Must be served at least twice per hour on a Saturday from 08:30 until 18:30
• Must be publicly accessible to us (the local steel plant has its own bus line within its grounds, which for some reason is operated by the local transport agency)

This sums up to a total of 246 stops, a much more diverse map to play with.

red = tram, blue = bus. Symbols are just icons and not reflective of surrounding hiding zones, which are much larger

Network map of included tram and bus lines

Custom Rules and Modifications

We played a small game. I anticipated that runs could take rather long, and some of our players were initially very hesitant to commit to those, so we made a few adaptations to reduce the expected duration of a run and improve overall comfort.

• We would only play one round per team each, ending the game day afterwards.
• Instead of starting from the central railway station, we started from "Linke Brückenstraße", a transit hub north of the river, which also had the nice benefit that we needed to get up a bit later in the morning, those extra 10 minutes of sleep were strongly appreciated by the lazy students that we are.
• We all agreed to take a lunch break of approx. 30 minutes after the first hiding team was found.
• Due to the risk of the 2nd run starting somewhere with very bad connectivity, we specified that the hiding period only starts once the first bus/tram actually stops at the starting station. To compensate, we reduced the hiding period down to 25min.
• To reduce at least some of the overlapping station hiding zones and to speed up the endgame, we reduced the hiding zone down to 300 meters.

Additionally, we made some further rule changes that made sense for our specific situation:

• We all own a Klimaticket (year-long public transit pass), so we decided that you don't necessarily need to only take urban routes to get to your spot. For example, you could take an S-Bahn train or regional bus to get to your final spot, as long as that final spot is in some way part of the network outlined above.
• The rule about disregarding Points of Interest outside the game map would have made some questions redundant (coastline, airport, zoo, ...), so we decided to include them instead. As I planned to prepare an official "source of truth" map covering all questions regardless, this didn't cause us any additional issues.
• The way the "Photo showing building visible from station" question is worded, it would be impossible to fulfill at some stations where you couldn't possibly get both sides of a super large residential building block onto a single photo, so we made some slight adjustments there.
• To balance out the differences in game and map knowledge among teams (and the huge advantage of starting from a predetermined station), we decided that each team was forbidden from strategizing in advance, spending only 10 minutes of preparation time before the hiding period started to come up with a plan for where to hide.

The Preparations

I prepared an online map using Atlas that contained all necessary information. I extracted the information from OpenStreetMap using Overpass, and then manually verified all features to reduce false positives and duplicates, e.g. stuff that does not deserve the name "Park". Afterwards, I moved all my data into QGIS to design printout maps: One main map showing all stations, administrative boundaries, named bodies of water and the high-speed railways, and a POI map showing basically everything else.

Main Station Map, designed to be printed in A3

POI Map, designed to be printed in A3

Now let's get into the game itself. I'll tell both rounds from my perspective, but add extra information we didn't know at the time as spoilers. This way, you can either read it from my own perspective or from that of an all-knowing observer.

Round 1 - Seeking

The other team got to go first, so all my team had to do was be ready at 09:02 in the morning at "Linke Brückenstraße". Unfortunately, one of us barely missed the tram there and would only be arriving a few minutes after the game started. This made the start more stressful than expected, but nonetheless, the other two of us started with our first question: the proximity to the airport (which is outside of the map bounds, but towards the south-west). The answer was closer, which meant we could eliminate everything that was further away from the city center than we were, giving us only one viable direction we could go.

>!The hiders were actually looking into whether they could move to flip the answer because they were close to the boundary, but couldn't quite manage to move that far.!<

Our last team member arrived with the next tram, but we shushed her back into it as she was trying to get out and together we rode the line a few stations towards Rudolfstraße, a large transit hub just north of the river and Old Town. In the meantime, we asked for a photo of a building visible from their stop:

Building visible from hiders' stop

As you can see, this didn't quite give Habsburg vibes, but it also didn't tell us much otherwise. Was this a fancy, modern residential building or some office tower maybe? In any case, we wanted to make sure that crossing the river was the right call, so we asked for a 2km radar next. That was a miss, meaning we could safely continue south.

>!This time around, the hiders did move in order to flip the result, as their stop was right on the boundary once again.!<

State of the game after 3 questions

>!Technically, a small sliver of Pöstlingberg was also still in play here for quite a long time, though because of us doing the 2km radar on a physical map we missed this fact, and they couldn't have gotten there because of the early morning timetable. We also considered a lot more stations in the southeast as still possible than actually still were.!<

We also asked for a photo of the widest street.

https://preview.redd.it/mmmnjj9uy24h1.jpg?width=4000&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=e09c195e1a5eb293eaadc3afbe7b33a991dde467

This reinforced my belief that they were somewhere in the western district of Froschberg, which has fancy residential buildings and very similar streets (I had been there recently on a bike tour). We decided to continue south, taking a tram of Line 4. While we were on there, we asked the hiders if we were on the same transit line as them. This question was vetoed, which initially surprised us quite a bit. After a bit of research on the tram, we concluded that on this line they couldn't have gotten very far anyways in 25 minutes, and that there were only 4 feasible stations on it anyways, all located right next to a large four-lane street. We >!(correctly)!< identified this as a red herring, and hopped off at Linz Central Station to do some more in-depth research.

We were now 45 minutes into the game, and we sat down in the Central Station to discuss our options and try to find a suitable match on satellite imagery. Doing so, we also tracked how far south they could have gotten in 25 minutes and excluded a large portion of the game map this way.

State of the game after 5 questions

In hindsight, we took way too long here and probably could have spent the time better by being more actively on the move. During this process, we first asked for proximity to a mountain (rather a hill on this map) and proximity to a second administrative division, and due to Linz being its own "Bezirk", that basically meant municipal boundary. The way we asked the question confused the other team because my map only showed the municipal boundary as a 3rd-level boundary, and had no 2nd-level entry in its legend. Really prepare your maps for all possibilities, people!

After a phone call, we clarified this, though, and both questions came back as a miss. This forced us to discard our whole theory about where they were hiding, and we had to come up with a new plan. The remaining area, excluding stuff with obviously larger streets, still contained a few stops south of the railway, and some stuff towards the east in Franckviertel and a few stations north of it.

State of the game after 7 questions

We wanted to move towards the broad direction of the remaining stops and were about to get to the bus stop outside the station when we got hit with Curse of the Jammed Door, meaning we could only enter the bus if we managed to roll more than a 7 on a 2d6 dice throw. We managed to do exactly that, though, and the curse practically had no gameplay impact. We got into our bus of Line 12 and stayed on until Europaplatz, playing a 1km thermometer along the way to confirm that we actually were getting closer. The thermometer was a hit, leaving just two stragglers south of the railway, all of Franckviertel, and the couple of stations north of Franckviertel.

Game Map after Thermometer

We got to Europaplatz 90 minutes into the game, but just before we wanted to ask whether or not they were in the same city district (Franckviertel by virtue of crossing the street), we were hit with a Curse of the Ransom Note.

>!Geographically, at this point we were already very close to the hiders, so they got to their final hiding spot. We wouldn't realize that fact for a long time though.!<

We quickly went to buy a newspaper (buying a copy of Der Falter, my team member refused to buy anything but high-quality journalism) at a nearby drug store, but the assembling of the ransom note without scissors and in windy conditions took us another 25 minutes before we could finally ask our question.

\"Are you in the same district?\"

The question came back as a miss. Now the only stations left were two stations south of the railway, which we checked on satellite and the streets didn't seem to match, "Prinz-Eugen-Straße", the station right next to us (on a massive road, so also out of the question), and three stations north of us where they could have technically moved within their area to be outside the 2km radar. To be 100% sure because we didn't want to backtrack by foot and it was getting increasingly hot outside, we asked if their nearest library matched ours (Medical Faculty of the university grounds north of us), which was a hit. But even before they answered the question, it struck me: I know this building, this is part of the medical campus I've been to once two years ago!

>!It turns out, I was thinking of a different, similar building, but the resulting insight was correct nonetheless.!<

With the help of a local kid who held a bus door open long enough for us to quickly get across the street and catch it, we went north to Gruberstraße and decided to just walk down all remaining options, trying to match the building. At the 3rd station we checked, which was "Paula-Scherleitner-Weg", we finally matched the building, and we knew that the endgame had started after almost 3 hours.

We identified a few probable hiding spots among the various greenery and parks in the zone. I thought a park surrounding the backside of a hospital in the area was the most likely spot. Immediately at this point, we were struck by Curse of the Right Turn, stopping us from going in that direction, so we stumbled around for a bit. During this time, we asked for a photo of the tallest visible structure, but got hit by a Randomize and received an image of the sky instead.

A picture of the sky from the hider's spot

This made the park even more likely, so after the curse finally cleared, we went in that direction. We ended up taking a wrong path to get there, maybe trespassing on high school grounds (signage wasn't quite clear) and we were on the wrong side of the fence, but we finally found the hiders after 3 hours and 16 minutes. With 6 minutes of time bonuses in their hand, their final hiding time was 3h 16min.

Relieved that we finally got them, we took our lunch break together, but before long it was time for my team to start their 10 minutes of strategizing before our hiding period started.

Round 2 - Hiding

Let me tell you, getting to a coherent plan supported by 3 people in 10 minutes is quite stressful! We floated a few ideas, checking if there would be some weird, unexpected connections we could take. We settled on the following plan:

• take line 45 northbound until Fadingerstraße in the city center
• walk over to Hessenplatz, which is the central hub for regional bus lines, on foot
• take regional Bus 251 leaving the city northbound
• get off at Bruckneruniversität, which wouldn't be reachable by the "usual" way of getting there, which is the Pöstlingbergbahn

Hopefully, this would greatly confuse our opponents! We executed the plan without issues and arrived at our lovely hiding area 25 minutes later. Full of greenery, having a nice garden area around the private university there, and situated at a bit higher elevation halfway up the Pöstlingberg, and therefore less hot than the blistering heat of the paved city center. We felt quite good here, hoping that our misdirection combined with the many transfers necessary and low frequency (which I remembered being only every 30 minutes) of the Pöstlingbergbahn would maybe earn us the time necessary to win the game.

>!First blunder: Unlike every other line in Linz, the Pöstlingbergbahn actually has an increased frequency on Saturdays for the tourists, meaning it runs every 15 minutes and is thus one of the highest-frequency lines on the map.!<

With the end of our hiding period, we were immediately hit by a 2km radar (miss). Soon afterwards, they requested the photo of the building at the station. We didn't scout our place out in advance, so this was the best we could do:

Building visible from our station

The trees behind the building already probably exclude a lot of the city, but at least we were able to hide the fact that we're hiding on a hill.

>!At this point, one of the players on the other team checked the reachability of Pöstlingberg (end of the line we were on) using Scotty, the go-to Austrian transit planner. Turns out, it did totally account for our weird move and showed them early that our station was in play. Whoops.!<

10 minutes later, they started their 1km thermometer and took a bus straight north, until Lederergasse, which was warmer. This was great news for them, because it had reduced the map down to ca. 50 stations.

Game Map after 3 questions

Then, for half an hour, not much happened from our perspective, giving us some confidence that the way we got here had successfully confused them. We mostly stayed in the park around the university, considering different hiding places based on satellite/maps, while we could see that they were moving to Rudolfstraße.

Our hope was quickly shattered once they asked if their library was the same as ours, which was a hit. Very quickly, we realized that this was catastrophic news. There is a library directly north and south of the Danube, and others further north-east, meaning they reduced the map significantly.

Game Map after 4 questions

At this point, we panicked a bit and decided to finally do the discard 2, draw 3 we had been holding for a while. We drew and almost immediately played both Curse of the Water Weight (seekers must acquire 2 liters of liquid each before asking another question) and Curse of the Brained Drain. We disabled the photo of the tallest visible structure, the custom radar, and the distance to a golf course (red herring, semi-successful).

Unfortunately, the seekers cleared the water curse very quickly, in just ~10min, as there was a convenience store nearby. Meanwhile, my team looked for a hiding spot, finding a promising bench on an inconspicuous footpath (marked on Google Maps) across the woods that was obscured by foliage from 3 sides. A cuddly local cat was a also a huge bonus. Meanwhile, the seekers moved a bit away from us by tram, reducing our sense of urgency, which is why we didn't move to our final hiding spot yet.

>!They were in fact just walking one station down the line by foot to get a better separation for their next question that way.!<

We assumed they took the bait with the golf course and overconfidently moved back to the university. We were then asked the distance to a zoo (closer) from Wildbergstraße and a photo of the widest street in quick succession, which we tried to make appear as wide as possible.

https://preview.redd.it/605vmij9a34h1.jpg?width=2880&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=0a0f73acc597c66a4ac039c122fd515248b125b7

Game map after 6 questions

>!With these questions answered, only about 12 stations remained in the game, half of which served by the Pöstlingbergbahn. The seekers decided to simply ride the line until the last feasible stop, successfully trying to match the building photo.!<

Then, catastrophe struck. While we were considering whether to move to our final spot or not, their tracker, which had been stuck in the same building for almost 5 minutes, suddenly jumped and showed them being at our station! We asked them via chat what the hell just happened and where they really were, to which they replied "at your station". Personally, I was super confused how they could even get here this fast.

>!Turns out the tram only needs 4 minutes from where they were to our station, and the tracker updates happen only every few minutes. Additionally, the specific tram they took didn't show up on any schedules, so either it was a super delayed one or some other weird out-of-schedule thingy?!<

After deliberating on pausing the game, we instead hid right where we were as best as we could (within some concrete walls on the parking lot of the university), and resumed the game from there.

They intuitively walked in the right direction, asked for a selfie, and got a concrete background wall which told them information that was quickly made redundant by them advancing around the corner of the building and finding us there.

So, in the end, we were bested by quite a significant margin after just 1 hour and 55 minutes. With our amazing two minutes of time bonus in our hand, our final hiding time was 1h 57min.

The aftermath

Completing the game day a bit earlier than we anticipated, we took the Pöstlingbergbahn we were already on all the way up the mountain, enjoyed the view, and had coffee/cake/ice cream at a cafe on the premises of the castle that sits on top of the mountain (Adam would have loved it here). We discussed strategies, revealed some details on how the other side of the runs went, and collected feedback on what worked well and what didn't. Then, feeling very exhausted, we all went home and took a very necessary and very well-deserved shower.

My girlfriend and I had a total blast playing the game, the others also had fun, but some of them weren't quite sure how much replayability still remains within this map and the game overall. Weather allowing, at least half of the players are set to do another game sometime in July.

Take-Home Messages

If you're planning to play this game yourself, here's some insight that might be useful to you:

• The game on both sides is much, much more stressful than how it appears on the show. Especially when playing on a small map, you just don't ever really get the "thinking breaks" while riding transit at all. The hiders are also nearly constantly busy doing stuff for questions and curses.
• Well-prepared game materials, such as printed maps, matter a lot. I think it would have taken both teams twice as long to figure out how to solve the long game if we had just gone in with a "look on Google Maps and it will be fine" attitude.
• The tracker from Google Maps updates only every 2 minutes or so. Google Maps also rounds the measured distance to faraway places (i.e., the airport) down to just "11km" without further digits, making it really hard to answer questions where hiders are just barely on the decision boundary.
• There is stuff in the game that is just plain ambiguous. Be prepared to come up with "best effort" solutions on the spot.
• The rules give you a great framework to play with, but to really leverage your local peculiarities, feel encouraged to customize.
• Given the huge density and variety of POIs and easy ways to slice the map, Linz felt like a relatively easy map to play in. The same might also apply when you're playing a small game in your local city. Especially the second run, which found the right station by asking just 6 questions, was probably played close to optimal despite this being the first time we ever played this game.
• At least to us, in these two runs, the base deck feels a bit underpowered due to us drawing relatively few cards. We might consider grabbing the expansion pack and/or adding custom curses to compensate.
• The actual size of reachable stations doesn't matter as much as I expected, except for extreme outliers. We would have taken about as long to finish the runs had we started from the central station.
• Replayability might indeed suffer when you play on the same map repeatedly. We'll consider having the hiders start with one Veto in their hand or certain questions banned in the future to encourage more creative long game solutions.
• For the casual setting that is a home game compared to the actual show, a cool thing would be to have mini-curses that have the same effect as a time bonus gameplay-wise, while being a bit more fun to increase diversity.
• We felt like being forced to plan out everything in a limited time frame before the run starts balanced the playing field. However, next time we'll increase it up to at least 15 minutes to allow more discussion.

I hope you found this report as fun to read as I found it to write! If people like this sort of stuff, I might do another one for round 2 after we played it out.