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!

Slight Spoilers for season 18, episode 3 of Jet Lag: The Game.
Hello my fellow fans of Nebula and Youtuve series Jet lag: The Game. In The Layover for episode 3, Adam and Ben voiced how neither loved the Massachusetts challenge and just kinda accepted that the challenge was going to be easy as well as having multiple different challenge drafts. So as a person born in the greatest state in these United States, Massachusetts, I took it upon myself to make 10 possible drafts for said challenge which I think are funny and in the spirit of the game. This is all in fun and was done to be a fun writing/thought experiment for myself. Let me know your thoughts. If you all enjoy, I could try with other states and see y’all’s thoughts. I have ordered them from my least favorite concept to my favorite.

Park your car near Harvard Yard:
Park your car and visit Harvard Yard. You must spend at least 15 minutes in the yard.

Offer a free lesson:
In 1635, Massachusetts opened the first free public school, The Boston Latin School.
Find any free public school, find anyone to be a student(cannot be a teammate) and give a free lesson.

Celebrate Thanksgiving at Plymouth Rock:
The Pilgrams hosted what would become known as thanksgiving in 1621.
Although the events have been obfuscated against that of what most certainly occurred in history, acquire 3 foods that one would commonly see at a thanksgiving table today and have a picnic near Plymouth rock.

Enjoy a warm chocolate chip cookie:
The chocolate chip cookie was invented in the toll house inn in the 1930s.
Anywhere in the state find a chocolate chip cookie(it must be warm) and your team must consume it.

Make James’ proud:
James Naismith invented the game known as basketball during wintertime in Springfield, Massachusetts.
Go to any basketball court/public basketball hoop, and for every three point shot made you can attempt a trivia question once you reach 5 correct you can claim the state. you may not use your phone to answer the questions and can warmup before starting the attempt.

Chill out as the Polar Bear:
Orson the polar bear is the mascot for Polar Beverages. His inflatable can be located atop the factory and is a fixture of the greater Worcester area.
Become a bear and consume Polar seltzer with Orson the Polar Beverages Bear as a bear in Worcester.

Ghost hunt at a hot spot:
New England and more so Massachusetts has numerous haunted attractions and legends.
spend 30 minutes as a ghost hunter in one of the following massachusetts hot spots or until you collect evidence of a ghost:
• Hawthorne hotel
• Hammond castle
• Lizzie Borden house
• USS Salem

Memorize charlie on MTA(MBTA):
In 1949 the MTA Song was written to help campaign for Walter O’Brien as mayor, and against the at the time concerning “exit fares” the MTA collected at the time.
memorize the mta song and claim the state.

Get off the MTA(MBTA),
In 1949 the MTA Song was written to help campaign for Walter O’Brien as mayor, and against the at the time concerning “exit fares” the MTA collected at the time. Charlie got on in Kendall Square station and never returned.
Take Charlie’s part by starting at Kendall Square station and spin a wheel of one of the other stations(or accepted modern equivalent station) that mentioned in the song. Get off at that station, thus saving yourself from Charlie’s fate.

Play Dunkin’ pong:
America Runs on Dunkin’ more particular the birthplace of our country, Massachusetts. Massachusetts has one Dunkin’ for about every 6600 people.
Go to dunkin’ donuts and get coffee and Munchkins; play beer pong with them. You must be at least 10 feet away from your cup of coffee, you have 5 attempts before you must reattempt at a dunkin’ at least 1/2 mile away.

r/JetLagTheGame

Unplayed Wild Cards in Stateside Scramble

Can you justify what team you root for?

jet lag changed my life

On a roadtrip. This looked familiar

What region in the world has the best track record for Jet Lag games?

Question about logistics of Stateside Scramble

We played Hide and Seek across Linz, Austria (again / game 2)

Game changes

Round 1 - Seeking

Round 2 - Hiding

Take-home messages

We analyzed the teasers for Stateside Scramble.

paducah shouted out jltg on insta!

This episode’s Layover

In tag, why do the chasers never try to intercept the runner?

Found this in Melbourne CBD!

Bottle Flip

The renovation of the station in Nova Gorica (Slovenia) is completed. This is where Adam tried to escape Italy in Tag 3.

The Snack Zone: Gravity Falls Edition

We made a election themed Battle for America-esque game in Vancouver

Does nebula have the footage uploaded of the having to explain exactly what jetlag is to random people in public as bonus content?

Question for Nebula Subscribers

Amy is absolutely delightful

Massachusetts Challenge Idea