Web Video / Jet Lag: The Game

We play games where the world is our board.

Jet Lag: The Game is an online reality competition centered around travel. In it, players travel to various locations to complete challenges, helping them towards a larger goal - either by claiming territory or replenishing their travel budget. Permanent cast members are Sam Denby of Wendover Productions and Half As Interesting fame, and his editors, Ben Doyle and Adam Chase. When competing in teams of two, a guest competitor will pair up with Sam to round out the cast.

Gameplay includes a wide range of tasks ranging from bungee jumping to catching bugs to getting intoxicated. Beyond these challenges, expect to see lots of strategizing, logistics, running, and trying to outmaneuver the other players.

This series is available on YouTube using this link. As production is funded by Nebula, episodes release on said platform a week early, while Crime Spree (season zero) and supplemental videos remain exclusive to the platform.

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Seasons Thus Far:

• Season 0 (February 2022): Crime Spree: A season based around breaking obscure, unenforced US laws.
• Season 1 (May 2022): Connect Four: Sam and Brian (Real Engineering) take on Ben and Adam to claim four US states west of the Mississippi River, either horizontally or vertically adjacent.
• Season 2 (July 2022): Circumnavigation: Sam and Joseph (Real Life Lore) race Ben and Adam to circumnavigate the globe, stopping in North America, Europe, Asia, and Oceania.
• Season 3 (September 2022): Tag EUR It: Starting from Charleville-Mézières, France, Sam, Adam, and Ben take turns as runners and chasers. The runner must try to reach their destination as the runner (Zermatt, Switzerland for Sam, Jersey, UK for Adam, and Borkum, Germany for Ben), or bar that, be in their territory at the conclusion of three days, completing challenges to earn money for transportation.
• Season 4 (December 2022): Battle 4 America: In a rematch from season one, teams compete to claim the most states in 100 hours, with the ability to steal a state in a successful head-to-head and a two point bonus for claiming the most land area.
• Season 5 (March 2023): Race to the End of the World: Sam and Toby (Tibees) race Ben and Adam from the northern tip of New Zealand at Cape Reinga to the southern tip at Lookout Point, with challenges scattered about on the country's highway network en route that must be completed before the path can be proceeded upon for either team.
• Season 6 (June 2023): Capture the Flag Across Japan: Sam and Scotty (Strange Parts) race Ben and Adam across Japan's train system in three rounds of Capture the Flag, where each team's "flag" is an item from a vending machine in their territory and they must complete challenges to earn money for transportation and carry their opponent's flag back to their territory without being caught.
• Season 7 (September 2023): Tag EUR It 2: A replay of season 3: this time Sam is aiming for Jersey, UK, Adam for Borkum, Germany, and Ben for Zermatt, Swizerland.
• Season 8 (December 2023): Arctic Escape. Sam and Michelle (Challenge Accepted) race Ben and Adam from the northernmost point in the continental United States (Utqiagvik, Alaska) to the southernmost point in the continental United States (Key West, Florida). Along the way, they can do challenges to acquire tickets that let them take trains, planes, and automobiles.
• Season 9 (February 2024): Hide + Seek. A variant of Tag EUR It taking place entirely in Switzerland. Sam, Adam and Ben take turns as hiders and seekers, with the seekers able to use coins to purchase hints as to the hider's location, and the hider being rewarded for truthful answers with those coins to spend on dice rolls to select curses. Positions rotate after the hider is caught, and the player with the longest total hiding time after four days wins.
• Season 10 (TBD): Game details unknown. Will take place in Australia with Toby returning as a guest.

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DOCUMENT TROPES WITHIN JET LAG:

• Accidental Passenger: In season three, episode six, Adam and Ben board a train to catch Sam in a game of tag. They succeed in this goal and Adam makes a mad dash for the exits but is unable to get off the train in time, sending him away from his destination with his pursuers on board.^note It should be noted that it was actually better this way for Adam, as he had not yet collected the challenge cards from Sam. If he had managed to vacate the train, he would have been without any way of earning budget.
• All for Nothing:
  • Ben and Adam spend most of episode 6 of season 6 just trying to get enough distance to reach their far Flag. After an incredible sequence towards the end where a careful use of evasion and tower placement allow them to escape Sam and Scotty and assure certain victory, they decide to pull a challenge to make up the last coins they need for their plan to work. They immediately pull a curse that allows them to travel only on a late train (a serious problem on Japan's famously precise railways), and the only train they could take to win leaves on time. They're so dejected from the experience that they place a tower just to spite Scotty and then wallow in their defeat.
    • Averted as the boys do ultimately win the season, but their stroke of misfortune forces the game to go to sudden death.
  • In Season 9, much attention is drawn during Sam's run to Ben and Adam not wanting to let Sam get over 250 coins as it drastically increases his chances of pulling one of the best curses in the game, that being the one that allows him to move his hiding spot. Their aggressive playstyle leaves Sam with 205 coins and nowhere near pinning down his location, but he panics when Ben and Adam get into his area earlier than he anticipated and rolls the dice early. The curse that Sam gets is to fill in the holes in Swiss cheese, which is one of the worst he could possibly get for that value (rolling a 9 on 4 dice) - not only is it an incredibly easy challenge to do, but Ben and Adam were across the street from a cheese shop at the time - meaning that Sam wastes all his coins for nothing.
• The Alleged Car: For the "make a go-kart" challenge in season two, Ben & Adam make a comically rickety contraption — basically just a board with wheels and a bucket attached. It falls apart the first time Ben tries riding on it. For added fun, this all takes place in Italy.
• Anti-Climax: Season 2. Sam & Joseph's plan hinges on completing a bungee jump challenge in Singapore to get them onward travel to South Korea. This fails when Ben & Adam complete both that challenge and the "Eat at a Michelin-starred restaurant" challenge before Sam & Joseph. While Ben & Adam safely secure their onward travel to Australia, Sam & Joseph are essentially stranded in Singapore with too expensive flights, too many unsuitable challenges, and not enough time to reach the finish line. The end of the video doesn't even cut to them after their plan of gambling their way to enough money for a flight to the US fizzles out.
• Awesome, but Impractical:
  • In the European tag game, the rules technically allowed for a player to board an airplane, which would likely make them impossible to catch. However, affording it would have required so many challenges that the player would almost certainly be caught.
  • In Arctic Escape (season 8), players were allowed to circumvent the mandatory rest periods by riding on sleeper trains. Ben and Adam pull off the trick, thinking that it will shoot them ahead in the race. However, the rule also requires players to get off at the first stop after the rest period ends, which leaves them stranded in a small town in Pennsylvania for much of the final day.
  • Spending coins on dice to roll for curses in Hide + Seek seems like it'd add intrigue and risk, especially since it's the deterrent to the Seekers asking too many questions, but in the final game the randomness far outweighs the dramatic benefit. It doesn't help that the very low valued curses are practically useless, and since it's always possible to roll 1's on every die it becomes incredibly hard to actually get one that will help^{Case in point}Of the 26 available curses we only learn about 12 of them, and of those 12 we only know about the ones above 9 because they're shown as examples. Comes to a head in the finale, where Adam manages to win the entire game without spending a single coin on curses.
• Batman Gambit: Strategies commonly rely on predicting the other team's ideal moves and reacting to them.
  • One gambit was present in Season 9 Episode 5. After having ran to Steffisburg from Thun to hide, Adam's strategy relied on Sam and Ben asking the "five words, one rhyming with your town" question early on the run, this question also having been asked early in the previous two runs. This question allowed Adam to send hints that are detrimental to the seekers, who discarded Thun due to it not rhyming with any of the words he sent and Steffisburg because he couldn't have arrived in its station on time.
• Beat Them at Their Own Game: In Season 6 Episode 2, Sam and Scotty attempted to take a Shinkansen within Tokyo to the flag at Yokohama, believing that Adam, who was at Shinagawa Station, would think they were taking a local train. At the end of Season 6, Ben and Adam used the same principle, and took the Shinkansen from Ueno Station direct to Tokyo Station, with Sam initially thinking that the two would take a local train and realizing his mistake too late. This resulted in him getting stuck at Kanda Station, and in Ben and Adam winning the tiebreaker round and Season 6.
• Bilingual Bonus: In season five, the team winning the Wellington challenge were rewarded with an earlier ferry to the South Island. The ferry operating the service is Kaiarahi, Māori for "leader".
• Blessed with Suck: Happens to both teams in Arctic Escape E4.
  • Both teams attempt to run a drunk mile, but Ben and Adam win by one minute. This lets them board a direct flight to Denver... which then gets stuck on the tarmac for two hours, letting Sam & Michelle complete challenges, including one that lets a team steal a ticket from their opponents' hand.
  • Sam & Michelle steal a ticket that lets them fly to a neighboring state, planning to fly to Denver... but then the flight is sold out, and there are no other flights that arrive before the rest period, so they are forced to rent a car and drive to Colorado instead.
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: Ben and Adam are more outwardly goofy and laidback than Sam, but they're the ones most closely involved with designing the games which means that they actually have more firsthand knowledge and familiarity with the games' intricacies than Sam and have so far won a lot more frequently than him.
• Call-Back:
  • Ben and Adam's excited chant of "Dunes, dunes, dunes!" in season four while they were driving to see the Indiana Dunes National Park is called back to in the beginning of season five when they and Sam all make the same chant while driving to the Te Paki Sand Dunes. Hilariously, Toby fails to get the reference despite being a big fan of Jet Lag.
  • Ben and Adam's Snack Zone segments in season five make a return in season six and Sam and Scotty do their own ripoff of it named Choo Choo Chew. Sam attempts to do one of these in Season 7 Episode 2, but Ben immediately pivots it into a Snack Zone.
  • When Ben and Adam find a bag of Trolli Glow Worms in a German vending machine there is a flashback to Season 5 Episode 3 during the challenge where Ben wanted to taste a glowworm. Adam even points this out.
• Capture the Flag: Season 6 is a game of capture the flag across Japan. Teams of two need to claim an item from the designated vending machine in their opponents' territory, then return it to their side without getting photographed.
• Celebrity Cameo: In season three, Ben and Sam, by pure chance, run into John Green while searching for Adam in Paris. The three have a brief conversation at a stoplight before John moves along when the light changes.
• Cerebus Syndrome: Crime Spree is far more lighthearted and funny than Jet Lag proper.
• Chain of Deals: Invoked in season four, where Ben and Adam bought an inexpensive ring at a pawn shop so they could resell it at another pawn shop for half the purchase price.
• Chekhov's Armory: Both cars in the New Zealand race carry all the materials that are required for a challenge but not available on short notice from stores. These include snowboards, fishing poles, rugby balls, camp stoves, snorkelling equipment and more, many of which are shown in the background before they're used.
• Chekhov's Skill: Toby knits a square for one of the challenges, which is relatively easy to do for just about anyone. But her skill comes in very handy when, when the Wellington challenge requires her to wear a tie, she knits one in the car instead of buying one. This ends up saving just enough time for her and Sam to avoid getting caught by Ben and Adam, who were ready to nerf them.
• Complexity Addiction: Sam admits to having one, and frequently loses because he tries needlessly elaborate strategies. Case in point, in the tag game, he spends much of his first turn running away from his target.^note The logic being that he can spend his first turn as a runner grinding through challenges to get budget, so in his second turn, he can do a costlier but safer high-speed run to his destination. While this is a pretty good idea, it relies on consistently getting achievable and rewarding challenges in order to earn enough coins to make the costly trip, and Sam is unable to afford the high-speed rail in time. When he decides to actively resist this tendency in the New Zealand season, things go better for him almost immediately.
• Confession Cam: In season three, there are several scenes where Sam hides in the restroom so that he can film himself talking about his strategy without his current team partner overhearing him since this season's structure meant that he, Ben, and Adam kept alternating between working together and working against each other.
• Cosmetic Award: There's no reward for winning, since most of the people who designed the games are the same people who play them for fun and content, but season one did end with Adam 'giving' Sam a trophy that humorously had very obviously been digitally edited into the video post-production. This gag returned in seasons three and four where Sam was the one who 'gave' the winner(s) a digitally-edited trophy he claimed to have been carrying all this time in his backpack or car.
• Covers Always Lie: The thumbnail for Arctic Escape E3 shows Ben & Adam with a departure board that says "C27 / FLIGHT 1607 / TICKET SALES CLOSED". Their actual flight was numbered 741 and left from Gate B8.
• Cursed with Awesome:
  • In season three, the first curse card Sam draws forbids him to travel to a destination that has more than five letters in his name. This actually ends up benefiting him since he was originally planning to travel to Dunkirk next where he would have been caught by Ben and Adam sooner.
  • In season seven, Ben pulls curse cards that while they prevent him from getting to his destination, they help him win the game by baffling the chasers. In particular the last one, which gives 1,500 free coins in exchange for tripling the challenge veto period for the remainder of his run; as it was the last challenge he intended to do, he's able to happily accept the curse with no downside.
• Darkest Hour: Happens to Sam & Michelle at the end of Arctic Escape E5. Ben & Adam are in Chicago, with an 800-mile train (from Chicago to Pittsburgh), a 450-mile flight (from Pittsburgh to Charlotte, North Carolina), and a 1,000-mile flight west (from Charlotte to Key West). Sam & Michelle's only hope of winning is to steal a ticket from Ben & Adam; there are two steals in the day's deck, one of which requires a team to stand in a spot where Elvis Presley stood, so Sam & Michelle position themselves near a park that was the site of a stadium that Elvis played at. Sure enough, that ticket comes up, and Sam & Michelle head to the park... which is fenced off.
  • Subverted in the next episode when Sam and Michelle figure out that the specific spot they need to get to is outside the fence.
• Description Cut: Done too many times to count over the series.
  Adam: [Sam and Joseph] haven't completed any challenges yet so this'll hopefully cut to them doing some really huge challenge right now.
  (Cut to Sam and Joseph relaxing on a plane flight)
  • In Season 8 Episode 2, Sam asks Michelle to do her impression of Adam learning that his flight is delayed, to which she comments that he tends to repeat himself a lot and performs a Rapid-Fire "No!" as her impression. There's then an immediate cut to Adam doing exactly that.
• Deus ex Machina:
  • In season four, Sam and Brian are way behind in a challenge to see who can spot the most birds, and a loss would have put them too far behind in states to catch up. At the last minute, a massive flock of birds takes flight, shooting their count into the hundreds.
  • Episodes 2 and 3 of Season 7 have a chain of these that has to be seen to be believed, courtesy of Deutsche Bahn and the card deck:
    • Adam, the runner, has racked up enough budget to take him all the way to his goal with a near-insurmountable head start. Unbenownst to him, his train is delayed enough that he misses his connecting train in Munster and can't make his original plan.
    • Sam and Ben are the chasers, and with Adam's delay they can now nominally get into Munster before the rest period. Unfortunately, their train is also delayed, and they get stuck in Dortmund for the night.
    • The next morning, Sam and Ben can catch a train out of Dortmund and get into Munster before Adam can catch his train out...at least until that train is also delayed and Adam can safely make it out of Munster.
    • Adam's train from Munster to Emden, which is just a ferry ride away from his goal in Borkum, arrives just minutes too late for him to catch the early ferry, so he has to survive in Emden for over three hours until he can get on the next one, in which time Sam and Ben can finally get on a train and make it to Emden.
    • To slip onto the ferry, Adam plans to make enough coins to buy a power-up to freeze the chasers in place for 10 minutes, which would let him get onto the ferry if played at the right time. Unfortunately, he pulls three curses in his next four cards, the last of which (taking odd-numbered departure times) would prevent him getting on the ferry at all, and has to veto two. Less than 300 coins away from his goal, he's stranded in Emden and Sam and Ben corner and catch him.
    • In the next episode, Sam managed to chain multiple regional routes in an attempt to get to Brussels, as the chasers would have been forced to follow behind him for an hour. However, his run came to an abrupt stop after a signal failure forced Sam to get off at 's Hertogenbosch, resulting in Ben and Adam catching up to him and tagging him on the spot.
  • Episode 6 of Season 7 has the season basically conclude with one. Ben realizes that he can change to an infrequent train in order to get Adam stranded away from his territory if the chasers catch up, but only discovers this as his train is pulling into the station he needs to change at, completely forgetting that he doesn't have enough coins to take the new train. He draws a challenge, and it's basically one of the best he could get: a curse that instantly gives him 1500 free coins but triples his challenge veto period for the remainder of his run. Those coins are enough to get him to his new destination so far out of the way that he's won by the time Sam and Adam actually catch up to him. All of these are justified, of course, since this is an unscripted reality show.
• Didn't Think This Through: While doing the "kayak a mile" challenge in season two, Adam laments out loud that he hadn't thoroughly thought about how hard this challenge could be when he and Ben came up with it:
  Adam: You know, you're sitting at a computer and you're writing challenges and you're like, "It can't be that hard to kayak a mile," but then you're in the kayak in Singapore — it turns out it's harder than you thought it would be!
  • This proves to be a major contributor in their defeat in Season 5, with major ones being underestimating how long a cream trip in the Bay of Islands would take and overestimating how long it takes to make serviceable cheese.
  • In Season 6, Adam has Sam cornered in a remote Japanese village with the latter's only escape route being a slow northbound regional train. To cut him off, Adam runs several kilometres to tag Sam, who immediately points out that the only train that he could have taken to get away would have had Adam on it since it had to pass through his station first.
• Disguised in Drag:
  • Adam tries this in season 3, using a green soccer shirt, some brown pants, a face mask and a long-haired wig. He gets caught at a train station after taking the mask and wig off due to them being too hot to wear all the time, and then forgetting to put them back on upon getting off a train with the hunters around.
  • Ben and Adam dress up as women at one point in season five in preparation for trying to catch Sam and Toby unawares with Nerf bullets.
  • Adam attempts this again to try and redeem himself for his failed season 3 attempt in season 7, Wearing a skirt and a sunhat to hopefully obscure his body from far away, complete with a vest and a backpack that can be turned inside out to change its color. It completely fails, since he happens to cross a road in perfect sync with Sam's tracking device with absolutely no one else around, giving him away. It helps that he'd already used this trick before so the other two would be used to it by now, but at least he executed it better this time.
• Disproportionate Retribution: In Season 7, Episode 2, Ben has a...creative idea for how to deal with a three-hour lead that Adam has built up due to Ben being caught at one of the most remote train stations in the country:
  Ben: But only theoretically three hours ahead.
  Sam: You banking on a derailment?
  Ben: Well, we could call in a bomb threat?
• Do Not Run with a Gun: Averted Trope: Sam & Toby sneak up to the route that Ben & Adam are taking on bikes to intercept them. Once the biking team comes within range, Sam charges full-tilt at Adam and shoots him with his nerf gun while sprinting.
• Drunken Glow: Michelle Kare manages to outdo every other Jet Lag contestant in terms of drunkeness, where after a failed drunk mile she is reduced to a barely coherent mess who even hiccups when she talks.
• Early-Installment Weirdness:
  • Crime Spree, considered by the crew to be Jet Lag's "pilot season", was very different from the later official Jet Lag seasons. It had no mandatory rest periods, the crew had separate people for filming and narrating instead of the players doing all the filming and narrating themselves, and Ben and Adam weren't racing to complete the same goal as Sam but were instead just trying to prevent him from completing his own goal.
  • The first two Jet Lag seasons lacked the purchasable power-ups that all later seasons would have in some form and there was more of a focus on plane flight than in later seasons that tend to be built more around car or train transportation. The first season also had the game start in a motel room with the players sitting down to explain the game's rules and talk about strategy for several minutes before leaving; all future seasons have the game start outside with the players immediately running to get transportation and the game's rules being explained via voiceover.
    • These seasons, as well as season 4, also used exact dollar amounts for purchasing travel and accommodation, with season 1 having a fixed amount and season 2 allowing them to earn more, incetivising finding cheaper but less convenient means of travel and needing to keep hotels in mind. This appears to phasing out and replaced with the more abstract coins in later seasons, with accommodation not factoring into the budget and expenditure based on travel time or distance instead of the exact cost of travel, to incentivise more pure strategy.^note  It's possible that Sam and Joseph losing season 2 by missing a cheap flight and instead failing to get a more expensive flight was considered anti-climatic Season 8 would end up being the first series set in the continental US that doesn't use exact dollar amounts, instead using a randomly generated ticket systen.
    • The first two seasons also had the guest contestants contribute less strategic talk due to them not being as familiar with the game mechanics as Sam, Ben, and Adam, whereas later team-up seasons had the regular trio make more of a concerted effort to educate the guest contestants about the game and have them participate in simulations beforehand. It's especially noticeable with season 1 vs. season 4, where Brian was Sam's guest partner on both seasons but was much more actively involved in strategy discussion with Sam in season 4 compared to season 1.
  • The hosts have explained in behind-the-scenes videos that they initially thought of the show as an endurance challenge, with the contestants seeing how much physical punishment they could take from brutally long travel days. Starting with the "Tag Across Europe" season, the focus has shifted more toward strategy, gamesmanship, and wacky challenges in exotic locations, with regular sleep and meals mandated by the rules.
    • This also makes Jet Lag a bit of an Artifact Title, as three seasons (3, 5 and 6) have now been filmed entirely in one time zone each.
• Epic Race: Season two's challenge was to be the first pair to circumnavigate the globe. To this end, each team was given a travel budget insufficient to cover all necessary flights, but allowed it to be replenished by completing designated challenges. To prevent a team from completing all their challenges in one spot, tasks completed in the same city saw diminishing returns.
  • Season five sees the teams racing from the north to the south of New Zealand, completing challenges along the way.
• Failure Montage: Season 5 features Sam and Toby in two of these: the first in a task to kick a rugby ball through the equivalent of the goalposts, and the second trying to throw a gumboot. Appropriately, it's set to "The Blue Danube". Adam and Ben also have one when trying to complete the handstand roadblock.
  • Season 9 features one with Sam trying to throw a object to knock an apple off Ben's head, interspersed with SpongeBob SquarePants-esque "five minutes later" cards.
• For Want Of A Nail: Teams often get into serious trouble when some small aspect of a challenge fails to go their way. Examples include Sam and Joseph missing out on booking an optimal flight in season two by only three minutes which forced them to go for a much more expensive flight route that they ultimately couldn't afford, or Ben and Adam losing the Auckland challenge and its huge coin reward to Sam and Toby by mere seconds in season five.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus:
  • In season 1, a box briefly pops up on screen whenever a team pays for transportation with a reason given for the cost. Normally the reason is a straightforward one like "Plane Tickets" or "Uber", but there are a few amusing blink-it-and-you'll-miss-it reasons mixed in with the normal ones, like "Screwing Sam" and "The Suite Life of Sam and Brian".
  • In season 2, just before the Vomit Discretion Shot occurs during Adam's pastry run, a "Vomit cut available on Nebula^*Not really, sickos " message appears on screen for a split second.
  • In season 9's finale, the train that Sam and Ben boarded to get to Bergdorf is bound for Thun as shown by the LED displays briefly visible inside the train. In the next scene, Adam sees them going south and wonders if the chasers have figured out his location. While Adam was not in Bergdorf as the chasers thought he was, he did disembark at Thun to get to Steffisburg, his hiding place.
• Fun with Subtitles:
  • In a scene in season two where Ben and Adam are trying to come up with entertaining content while on a twelve-hour flight, Adam's reaction to Ben juggling his phone and accidentally dropping it is subtitled as "**entertained most when Ben fails**".
  • In season six, when Adam has to wear a pink bow for the "You are now Hello Kitty" curse, the subtitles switch to calling him Hello Kitty.
  • Season seven has the captions make a Running Gag over Sam's inability to pronounce "Bar-le-Duc" as anything other than "Bar-de-Luc".
• Gambit Pileup: One between Sam and Adam in the Japan season is so incredible that Sam's mere attempt to explain it is used an end-of-episode cliffhanger. The basic setup: Sam has the flag and is attempting to get back to his own territory, but Adam is moving to intercept him on the same shinkansen line.
  • Sam discovers that a slower regional line will also get him back across the border, but its next train leaves well after Adam would arrive on the shinkansen. However, Adam's next shinkansen is scheduled to leave the station heading north exactly one minute before Sam's shinkansen leaves going south. If Sam sees Adam get on the train during that minute, he can hop his own train, ride right past Adam, and get home free. If Adam does NOT get on the bullet train, Sam can safely wait for the regional train instead.
  • However, Adam realizes that Sam has realized this, and drops a lightning tower on the station he's currently in, forcing Sam to roll a die with a chance of getting tagged. Sam sees Adam moving north and hops on the shinkansen, thinking he can get through with just a single die roll.
  • Unbeknownst to him, Adam has dropped a second tower on the same spot, trapping Sam in the southern station. This not only forces Sam to roll the die several times (though he evades capture this way), but strands him until Adam can get back on a bullet train going south. Sam quickly improvises a new plan in which he'll ride a regional line between the same two stations, forcing Adam to chase him back and forth and hopefully run out of coins first.
  • This also fails when Sam misreads the tracker and jumps off the train at a rural station, failing to notice that Adam is still heading towards him. Accepting that he has no chance to avoid capture, Sam decides that all he can do is waste as much of Adam's time as possible. The gambit pileup ultimately results in the two of them playing hide-and-seek in a remote Japanese village.
• Game Show Physical Challenge: Jet Lag is a travel competition built around completing tasks, sometimes physical in nature. Some physical challenges include climbing to a high point in season two and Zorbing in season five.
• Golden Snitch:
  • Season four provides a "plus 2" land bonus for whoever claims the most square milage by the end of the game, which ends up turning Alaska into this when Sam and Brian need the bonus to win.
  • In season five, the winners of the Wellington challenge were awarded a spot on the earlier ferry to the South Island, while the other team was forced to take the ferry three hours later, giving the winning team a huge time advantage. Subverted when the earlier ferry was delayed by 40 minutes and Sam and Toby had to veto the Picton challenge and serve a 60-minute veto penalty, cutting the lead to under an hour.
  • In season six, the first round is worth 1 point and the second round 2 points but the final round is worth 3 points which means that a team can theoretically lose both the first and second rounds but still tie it and force a sudden death tiebreaker if they win the third round.
• Gone Horribly Right: At the end of Day 2 of Crime Spree, Sam & JT decide to stay at the Boston Airport Hotel, but then realize that it would be too obvious, so they exploit a rule that allows them to turn off their tracker 30 minutes before arriving at any hotels they stay at. They drive away from the Boston Airport Hotel, turn off the tracker, and then do a U-turn, all to make it look like they are going somewhere else. Adam & Ben are fooled by this, and they realize that they have no way of finding Sam & JT at this point, so they decide to turn in for the night... at the Boston Airport Hotel.
• Honor Before Reason: In both of the Tag Across Europe seasons Adam seems to adamantly refuse to stay in train stations due to how they affect the trackers, to the point of saying out loud that waiting for his train in an underground station is not cheating the tracker. Since the audience aren't aware of all of the rules of the game it's unclear if deliberately walking underground or in large crowds (both of which affect the tracker) is against the rules^note  Especially since this would be unenforceable in practice outside of the honors system, Adams steadfast refusal to do that comes across as this. Especially since in the second season going above ground leads Sam and Ben to find him easily in a situation where obfuscating his position was not only beneficial to him but his goal.
• Hope Spot: At the end of season one, Ben and Adam's car breaks down on the way to the Montana state capitol but they don't receive a call from Sam or Brian which makes them hopeful that the other team got stuck on their challenge and they thus still have a chance to win the last state. Unfortunately for them, it turns out that Sam and Brian did complete their challenge and was just waiting for them to arrive so that they could surprise them with the news.
  • Another one for Ben and Adam in the New Zealand race. After being behind for nearly the entire game, they get unbelievably lucky and draw the one curse that allows them to send Sam and Toby on a massive detour, diminishing their massive lead. Sam and Toby still win, though.
  • In the Season 6 finale, Sam attempts to tag Ben and Adam at Kanda Station, thinking that he can win the game as Scotty was about to score the second flag. However, he realized that the two can take a Shinkansen from Ueno Station direct to Tokyo, effectively ending the game.
• Ironic Echo Cut: Done as regularly as the Description Cuts.
  Ben: I would describe [the glowworms] in a very serious way as being quite magical.
  (cut to Sam and Toby)
  Sam: Okay, Toby, I just realized something magical. We're actually safely ahead.
• Joke Item:
  • One of the curse cards in Season 5 is to force the other team to have to listen to Tom Lehrer's "The Elements Song" on repeat until they reach their next challenge, which does nothing to actually hamper the other team, but which is very annoying. Ben and Adam force Sam and Toby to do it from Kaikoura to Christchurch, a roughly two hour and twenty minute trip.
  • Season 6:
    • The Mud Tower could be considered this. It does nothing except force any opponents in its radius to only walk sideways. Ben and Adam use it at the end of the third round to mess with Scotty since they're stuck where they are and about to be tagged anyway.
    • In The Layover, they explained that they initially thought of the Pizza Tower as this, not having realized that it could force opponents off their trains if placed down while the opponent was in range.
• Know When to Fold 'Em:
  • In season 6, Ben and Adam were able to get enough distance on Sam and Scotty to secure the first flag without trouble. Realizing this, Sam and Scotty conceded to losing the round, and spent the remaining time racking up coins to use going forward.
  • In season 7, Ben successfully runs out the clock by forcing Sam and Adam to follow him to a town in his finish zone from which Adam (the next runner) cannot escape due to its limited transport connections, meaning that even if he were to keep going, he'd lose anyway. Even though there's over an hour remaining, rather than a frantic dash through the town, the chasers have a relaxed walk to where Ben is waiting for them and concede the game to him.
• Law of Conservation of Detail: In season 5, the series brings a lot of attention to a particular curse Sam and Toby bring up: Ben and Adam forcing them to go down a much longer road, which could potentially cost them the game, while Ben and Adam are also hoping to pull that curse. Surely enough, the latter team pulls this exact curse right before the former team can get on the road that would almost guarantee victory.
• Lemony Narrator: In Crime Spree.
  Narrator: Ben & Adam are Sam's writers. In fact, they wrote the words I'm reading right now. On a completely unrelated note, I personally think that they're both very hot.
• Lifesaving Misfortune:
  • In Connect Four, the flight from Salt Lake City to Butte, Montana gets turned back to Salt Lake City. This allows Ben & Adam to claim Utah, ensuring that if they claim Montana, then they win. Ultimately subverted when Sam & Brian claim Montana first.
  • New Zealand:
    • Sam & Toby's original plan is to skip Queenstown, but they are two coins short of being able to. Luckily, Queenstown took a lot less time to complete than they expected, allowing them to skip Invercargill instead and win the game.
    • A meta example for the season itself, as explained in The Layover. For unclear reasons, Sam's visa required him to leave the country by a certain date, meaning that they had to move the season up by a week. This meant that they got the one week of good weather in a summer that was otherwise very rainy and stormy.
  • Arctic Escape: Sam & Michelle steal Ben & Adam's ticket that lets a team fly to a neighboring state. They initially plan to fly from Salt Lake City to Denver, but then that flight is sold out. They then plan to fly from Dallas to New Orleans, but then their previous flight is delayed, and they can't make it. They finally use it to fly from Atlanta to Key West and win the game.
• Loony Laws: Season zero, Crime Spree, was themed around breaking obscure, unenforced laws around the United States. In season four, this returned as an objective, where you could claim a state by breaking one of the unclaimed laws from Crime Spree. For Michigan, this was "Seduce and debauch an unmarried woman," which was interpreted to mean making a match on Tinder, then getting said match to perform an immoral act — in this case, spreading (obviously false) misinformation.
• Loophole Abuse: All players, especially Sam, sometimes use unconventional readings of a task to complete it in an untraditional way.
  • In season two, Sam and Joseph interpret "ascend 500 feet (152 m) to a high point" to include running up and down a small incline twenty-eight times and "transfer a cup of fountain water from one fountain to another" to include drinking fountains.
  • In season three, Sam realizes that nothing in the wording of the "touch an animal" challenge excluded the animal from being a human. After Ben and Adam admit that they overlooked that interpretation and it's a valid one, Sam simply touches Ben to complete the challenge.
  • In season five, when Ben and Adam are cursed to roll a die and take that many steps every time they walk during a challenge, they circumvent this by using bicycles as much as they can during that challenge.
  • Sam was forced to end Crime Spree one law broken short of the total needed for him to win due to his cameraman JT getting food poisoning. After the show proper is ended, Ben and Adam point out that there was a rule allowing them to add any additional laws they wanted to for Sam to break, and they subsequently award Sam one additional law broken...for violating Oregon labor laws by making JT work unpaid overtime, over Sam's protestations that given that JT was a salaried employee he wouldn't qualify.
  • In season six, players tag members of the other team by capturing them on camera, forcing them back to Tokyo Station to wait out a 30-minute jail period. When Sam activates a trap tower placed by Ben, forcing him to not move for 30 minutes, Ben catches up to Sam but purposely does not tag him (pointing his camera way from Sam) until after the tower penalty has elapsed in order to buy Adam as much time as possible to return with the flag.
• Luck-Based Mission:
  • In most seasons, the challenges the players have to complete are determined by them randomly drawing from a card deck. This means that, depending on their luck and current location, they can get a challenge that's extremely easy to complete or a challenge that's nigh-impossible for them to do.
  • The first fork in New Zealand has a path featuring challenges of fixed difficulty, and another path with a luck factor. For each challenge on the luck route, the difficulty is determined randomly upon arrival, such as digging a hole with parameters set by a six-sided die.
  • In Arctic Escape, one of the challenges is to create a giant die, with a side length of at least 1 foot (0.3 m), and then roll it. The reward is a flight with a length of 150 miles (240 km) multiplied by the the number rolled.
• Meaningful Name:
  • Adam Chase.
  • Season 9 is titled "Hide + Seek" with the "+" being the cross in the Swiss flag.
• Metagame: Sam, Ben, and Adam, who are all extremely familiar with one other, will often make gameplay choices based on what they believe the other players will do. Sam in particular has a tendency to go for high-risk, high-reward plays that usually backfire and allow Ben and Adam to win with a safer and more relaxed game, which he pointed out in season five and intentionally tried to break away from in that season.
• Missed Him by That Much: In episode five of season seven, thanks to a curse card throwing a Spanner in the Works, Sam and Adam end up boarding a train that Ben has just stepped off of and don't realize until the train has left the station.
  • It happens again in the next episode, as Ben successfully hides in Metz for ten minutes with Sam and Adam elsewhere in the station, unaware that his next train was so illogical to them that they didn't even know about it until after it left.
  • In season 6, episode 6, Sam fails to find Adam and Ben in a darkened museum in spite of getting close enough for them to be able to covertly film him on their camera. However, he does find them a little while later when he goes back to double-check the museum.
  • In season 9, episode 3, Ben hides in a playground that can't be seen from the main streets and the side path to it is very easy to overlook, which leads to Sam and Adam repeatedly walking right past his hiding location for over an hour of searching.
• Mistaken for Pedophile: Discussed by Ben in Season 9, after having second thoughts about hiding under a slide in a children's playground.
• Mood Whiplash: For a challenge in season five, Ben and Adam have to relax and eat cheese in a hot spring and they find it so relaxing that they wonder out loud why no one else is at the spring. An information box then appears on the screen with: "It turns out Kerosene Creek is full of brain-eating amoebas that will kill you if you put your head under water."
• Nerves of Steel: Sam. Beyond remaining calm and not getting too visibly upset even when his plans get derailed by his opponents, when Ben and Adam went bungee jumping in season two, they both were terrified and were screaming on the way down. By contrast, when Sam did the same thing with an even higher jump in season 5, he was completely silent.
• "Not Making This Up" Disclaimer: When it comes to some of the more ridiculously lucky or convenient situations, such as Ben and Adam pulling the exact curse they needed at the exact right time in season 5, the guys will often insist that the series is not scripted.
• Not Where They Thought: In The Layover for Japan E4, Ben says that he accidentally got on a women-only train car, and didn't notice until 20 minutes later when an English-speaking woman told him (politely).
• Obvious Rule Patch:
  • After JT fell ill from suspected food poisoning in season zero, subsequent seasons added mandatory rest periods and required team members to eat at least one meal per day.
  • Season 1 had multiple cards where you could instantly claim a State but you then had to perform your following actions at a handicap (essentially a precursor to the curse cards). When the game comes down to the final State Brian asks Sam what would happen if they drew one of these instant claim cards to win game and Sam reveals that since the game is over the handicap wouldn't apply (This would sadly deprive us of Sam and Brian having to arrange for their flights home without having to use words like "plane" and "fly").
  • A challenge in season three involved touching an animal, which Sam interprets as including humans and completes the challenge by touching Ben. It is now specified in any challenge involving animals that the animal must not be human.
  • A curse in season five penalized Sam and Toby if they said a word that contained the letter E before a certain amount of time had elapsed. Sam and Toby got around the curse by saying as few words as possible, which caused a significant amount of their screen time in two episodes to have no interesting dialogue or strategy discussion. In season six, when Adam got a similar "can't talk" curse, the card specified that he was still allowed to talk to the camera as long as he wasn't within earshot of his team partner.
  • Season 6, Episode 6 revealed two season-specific rules to prevent degenerate play. For the taggers, it is against the rules to take a train out of the neutral zone with the runners, because they wouldn't be able to get any space otherwise. On the flip side, players in enemy territory have to wait five minutes between placing towers, as otherwise, they could use them to burn coins before imminent capture.
  • When Ben and Adam discussed hiding places in Japan, it was made clear that hiding in public places is allowed, except bathrooms, because of privacy concerns.
  • Season 8 sees the return of steals from season 4, with the caveat that tickets that have been stolen before cannot be stolen again, likely due to the finale of season 4, which saw the two teams basically juggle a critical challenge, which ended up back in the original owner's hands anyway.
• Oh, Crap!: Season 8 starts with a major one from the winners of the first challenge, Sam and Michelle, as they're unable to book the only exit flight of the day on their way to the airport and the airport staff can't book them themselves. Fortunately they're able to get the tickets just three minutes before booking closes.
  • The other team get one the very next day, as Ben and Adam discover that their own flight to Anchorage is delayed, which disrupts their plan to get into the lower 48 states before the end of the day.
• Once a Season: A recurring challenge involves one team member (usually Ben) getting drunk.
• Record Needle Scratch: In Season 9 Episode 3, Sam and Adam have just arrived in the town Ben is hiding in (which took them a long time to figure out). They head down to the main street... where Sam realizes that he's been there before, prompting the scratch. It emerges that he went through the town whilst out running a few days prior.
• Retail Riot: Part of the "Be a Good Neighbor" challenge in Season 8 was to buy clothing from a goodwill store. Ben and Adam go to one in Seattle, where they are informed they could not film or bring their bags inside so Adam goes in to buy the clothes while Ben waits outside. After Adam returns, he describes what is apparently his first ever experience going inside one as controlled chaos, with stylized animations presented to accompany his description.
• Reveal Shot:
  • An excellent one from the first episode of Season 9, as as Sam is filming Ben walk along, the tower in which Adam is hiding emerges in the distance from behind Ben's umbrella.
  • The third episode also has one, with a zoom in to a sign showing which city Ben is hiding in.
  • Episodes four and five do the reveals on the graphic map for different reasons. For Sam in episode four, it's because the chasers went almost directly to the location he was hiding in and was just one stop down the line, and Sam starts panicking and accidentally gives away that he thinks they're already in the endgame. For Adam in episode five, it's after his victory, revealing that the last place that Sam and Ben thought he could be located was nearly 30 miles away from where he was actually hiding.
• Running Gag:
  • Season one had Ben and Adam giving each state capitol they travel to a rating out of seven American flags.
  • Season five had Ben and Adam taking "The Snack Zone" breaks in season five where they taste New Zealand snacks, complete with animated introduction screen.
  • Ben and/or Adam wearing Paper-Thin Disguises has featured more than once.
  • Ben has ended up drunk at least once per non-Tag Season.
• Running Gagged:
  • Season 6 featured Sam and Scotty creating a rival show to Ben and Adam's Snack Zone called Choo Choo Chew. When Sam tries to bring it (now titled Choo Choo Chew: Derailed) back for Season 7, Ben, who was with Sam at the time, hijacks it immediately for a Snack Zone segment, calling him out for co-opting their bit.
  • Season 8 ends the running gag of Ben getting drunk in every non-Tag season, as when the task requiring someone to get drunk appears, it is Adam, not Ben who completes it.
• Scenery Porn: It is a travel show, after all, and a number of the challenges require the players to visit the most beautiful location or a famous landmark in their current country or state.
• Separated by a Common Language: Invoked by Ben in the New Zealand Road Trip when he and Adam have to make a sandwich. They pick up the first loaf they can see which is called "Toast," leading Ben to question if New Zealanders call all bread toast. Ultimately Subverted however since, in reality Australia and New Zealand have two types of white bread: Toast, which is blander and sturdier because it's supposed to be burnt, and Sandwich, which is tastier and softer because it's being used fresh for sandwiches.
• Sherlock Scan: In the second episode of season 1, after Ben & Adam send a video to Sam & Brian claiming Arizona, Sam manages to notice the exact gate that they're at and then checks what flights are leaving from that gate around the time they sent the video to deduce their plan and form a counter-strategy.
• Shout-Out:
  • The flavor text given when Adam catches a fish in season two says "Found Nemo".
  • The animations for the battle challenges in season four are based on Pokémon's encounter animations.
  • One of the tasks used to claim a state in season four was to "Drive a Chevy to a levee and eat pie", a nod to American Pie's title track.
  • The Auckland challenge in season five involved destroying rings atop volcanoes.
  • A successful shooting of another player with a Nerf bullet in season five is marked by a "wasted" screen.
  • Inverted slightly in both Seasons 5 & 7, as Sam makes a nod towards Season 4's "DUNES!" chant, and in Season 7, Adam makes a reference to the glowworm taste gag from Season 5. Both are arguably shout-outs to themselves.
  • Season six, which takes place in Japan, has several shout-outs to Japanese media:
    • The animations for a player getting caught are modeled after Pokémon's catching-a-Pokemon cutscenes.
    • During the first round, Ben and Adam wear Mario and Luigi caps. They then change to Wario and Waluigi caps for the second round. Not only that, but one of the challenges forces Ben to collect three Mario Kart items.
    • The challenges include "Become Totoro" (stand at a bus stop and smile while holding an umbrella over your head for five minutes), "Go Super Saiyan" (style your hair to look spiky), and a "You are now Hello Kitty" curse (wear a pink bow on your head and not talk to anyone other than the camera for two hours).
  • In Season 7:
    • One of the curse cards requires the runner to move in a direction that he sees a naked mole rat moving in. The card's tagline? You've been Ratatouille'd
    • Another card, Fight Them On The Beaches is confirmed by Adam to be a direct Winston Churchill reference.
  • In Season 9, when Sam and Adam finally determine that Ben is in the town their in, they imitate the announcement of Saddam Hussein's capture by American troops by going "Ladies and gentlemen, we got him."
• Show Within a Show: Parodied mercilessly with THE SNACK ZONE and CHOO CHOO CHEW, both of which amount to little more than a few seconds of trying a snack and a brief reaction, but with elaborate bumper intros and endings.
• Signing-Off Catchphrase: Each season ends with someone, usually the guest, saying "I'm jet lagged."
• Smash Cut: Mercifully used whenever Adam is about to puke when doing the "Pastry Mile" challenge, the video abruptly cuts to Sam and Joseph talking at the airport.
• String Theory: In Season 9, the graphic used to show the hints that have been given by the hider takes the form of a pegboard with notes or images of these hints stringed together, centered around a map showing the parts of Switzerland the hider could still be at.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: Being a travel show done by a ragtag group of guerilla documentations there are a lot of situations a higher budget show wouldn't encounter:
  • In the first Tag Across Europe season Adam runs into considerable trouble when his bank dings his activity as fraud and locks his card. Since he is under a curse preventing him from using his phone and he'd forgotten about the exception for important matters such as this, the setback causes him great difficulty when he has to do... anything.
  • Capture the Flag features a curse that forces you to catch a late train in Japan. Anyone familiar with Japan's rail system knows that nothing short of a mechanical failure or serious threat to safety can cause that, and as a result it becomes quite a horrific run-ender for Ben and Adam.
• The Talk: A challenge in Season 8 requires a team member to explain "the birds and the bees" to a bird or a bee. Cue an inebriated Michelle giving an Awkward PG-rated one to a bird in a Petco.
• Tempting Fate: Season 9, Sam and Adam finally figure out that Ben is in Merlischachen and head into town while proclaiming to the camera "Ladies and gentlemen, we got him." It took them nearly two more hours to actually find Ben's hiding spot.
• This Is a Competition: Sam tends to take this attitude as the most fiercely competitive of the core trio. He makes a joke about this in season five by telling Toby that they should put a decal on their car saying, "Get outta the way, we're in a race".
• Tiebreaker Round: Because season six had the possibility of a 3-3 tie, there existed the possibility of a tiebreaker round, scattering seven flags around Tokyo, with the first team to return four winning the competition.
• Title Drop: Done by Adam at the end of every season since Season 2, with him nudging every guest since Season 4 (namely, Brian, Toby and Scotty).
  Adam: I'm jet lagged.
  Sam: Ohh, he said the thing!
  • Toby also drops the "I'm jet lagged" line at the end of season five after being nudged into doing it by the others who give similarly exaggerated "Ohhh!" responses.
• Two Scenes, One Dialogue: When players are discussing their strategies, they will often be edited together as to form a unified thought. For example, season three has Adam mentioning a strategy he believes will catch Ben off guard, stating he hopes there's footage of Ben saying something "along the lines of—" which cuts to Ben saying he thinks he's in a safe spot.
• Visual Pun: One of the challenges for Australia (visible in the end-of-previous-season teaser) involves throwing a shrimp and trying to hit a Barbie doll; in other words, "throwing shrimp on the barbie".
• Vomit Discretion Shot: Adam attempts to eat pastries in the season two "Pastry Mile" challenge after running laps. He vomits at least once a lap after the 3rd lap, and every time, it's either censored or immediately cuts to Sam and Joseph speaking and strategizing at the airport.
• Weather Saves the Day: In the New Zealand season, they coincidentally got the one week of good weather during one of the rainiest, stormiest summers in New Zealand history.
• Western Zodiac: In Arctic Escape, Michelle does a recurring segment called "the Zodiac Zone" where she discusses astrological predictions for the game.
• What an Idiot!: In-Universe. In The Layover in the S8–S9 off-season, Adam did a poll of 1,200 Jet Lag fans, with one question being "What is the dumbest thing anyone has ever done on Jet Lag?" The answers were: 1. Adam taking off his wig in Tag EUR It^note as it meant his elaborate disguise was completely wasted when Sam and Ben staked out the train station he was at; 2. Sam & Joseph gambling in Singapore in Circumnavigation^note a high-risk strategy that left them completely stranded halfway through the game; 3. Sam & Brian buying a tracker powerup in Battle 4 America^note as it wouldn't have given them any way to actually stop Ben and Adam's plan and they ended not not having the coin to steal back the critical challenge; 4. trusting Deutsche Bahn^note which has led directly to at least one tag in each season.
• World Tour: Season two, Circumnavigation, is a race to circumnavigate the globe, requiring each team to stop in several cities along the way to replenish their travel budget.

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CHALLENGE COMPLETED!