A review of Jet Lag: The Game

For reasons known only to God, I watched every episode (18 seasons and change) of Jet Lag: The Game this year.

I will now answer questions about it.

What is it?

A travelling competition show starring three twenty-something guys who look like they were selected at random from a college choir. Several seasons have a guest contestant, typically someone who runs an educational YouTube channel.

In each season, they turn a country or continent into a giant board/card game and compete against each other for bragging rights.

Is it good?

Yes. It wouldn’t work as a competition show or a travel show alone, but it’s a very entertaining combination of both.

80% of the show’s runtime is the respective players or teams strategizing about their next move while riding a train. It engages the same parts of your brain as playing Risk online while speed-walking through a museum exhibit.

It’s often funny and always endearing.

What’s the best season?

Season 7, Tag Eur-it 2.

Runners up: Season 14, Snake; Season 17, Taiwan: Rail Rush; and all the other Tag seasons. Not necessarily in that order.

What makes a good season?

The best Jet Lag seasons have most or all of the following:

1. Interesting, high-stakes challenges. The Hide and Seek seasons are good, but lack the “catch a fish in the Sydney harbor in the next 20 minutes or you’re cooked” tension of more challenge-focused seasons.
2. Tense, unpredictable competition. To be fair, they usually succeed in this department. Their one big flub was Season 5, Race to the End of the World, where (spoilers ahead) it was pretty clear from the jump who was going to win, and the structure of the game made it almost impossible for the other team to catch up.
3. Real-time location tracking. All the best freakouts are caused by one player seeing another player’s location.
4. Tricks and shenanigans. The three main players typically have a pretty good idea of what the others are doing at any given moment, even without a tracker, but when one of them is able to cook up an unexpected plan and pull it off, it elevates the drama a lot.
5. Wild strokes of fate. The moments that stick with me are the ones where impossible coincidences change the course of the game: one player gets off the train at the same moment the others board the train to look for them, someone draws the exact card they need at the last possible minute, a delayed flight turns a guaranteed win into a nail-biter.

Is it worth buying a Nebula subscription for?

Yes. I mean, for starters, Nebula is just a good subscription. Last year I deleted YouTube from my phone and downloaded Nebula, and that one change dropped the number of ads I see on a daily basis to almost zero. Nebula doesn’t have all the same channels, but the average content quality is much higher, and (it bears repeating) it’s totally ad-free. Plus it’s creator-owned, so your money is going to the channels you’re watching instead of Big Goog.

But even if you’re just subscribing to binge Jet Lag, you’re gonna save hours of your life skipping all the ads. I don’t have a referral link for you or anything, but I think it’s a good move.

Any last thoughts?

It’s embarrassing that the United States doesn’t have a nationwide high-speed rail network. I mean, we just look so dumb. Jet Lag isn’t even trying to make us look bad, we just do. Oh you need a car to travel between two adjacent states? What is this, the Stone Age? Stupid.