Jet Lag: The Game and Seeing the World as a Playground

By Diego Nicolás Argüello | August 15, 2025 | 11:45am

Tabletop Features jet lag: the game

Jet Lag: The Game and Seeing the World as a Playground

Since January 2019, I’ve hopped on planes consistently and regularly. Naturally, accruing travel knowledge and experience comes with a myriad of anecdotes and lessons. I paid 45 bucks, plus tip, for a burger and a beer during a layover in Lima, Perú, only to get a stomach ache that stuck with me during a nine-hour-long flight, and culminated in me getting sick the moment I set foot in Hollywood for the first time. I spent hours navigating Chicago’s train system back and forth after the first day of Riot Fest, which saw thousands of music fans overpopulating the city’s transit. Turns out it also happened to be Mexican Independence Day. In June, while holding both my luggage and two Nintendo Switch 2 boxes, a couple kindly invited me to their place to smoke weed, despite having only exchanged three sentences in an elevator.

My biggest takeaway, or mantra, if you will, is to have an anecdote a day. It doesn’t matter how big or small it is, but each day needs to be memorable in some way. Traveling is a wonderful experience, and it’s painfully fleeting. You blink your eyes and you’re back in your usual routine, wondering if the previous days or weeks actually happened. Anecdotes live as memories of that time spent. These situations all happened organically—or, well, due to bad planning, and often reckless behavior—but I also pushed myself to go outside and explore off the beaten path, inviting the possibility of the unexpected happening and making that day count.

In Jet Lag: The Game, the unexpected is pre-planned. Sort of. Since 2022, content creators Sam Denby, Adam Chase, and Ben Doyle have gotten together in a real-world location to play a board game… in which the cities, states, and countries serve as the board. The group, alongside occasional guests, has played tag across Western Europe, capture the flag across Japan, hide-and-seek in New York City, and more. It’s bizarre, exhilarating, and I’ve marathoned all 14 seasons available. The Amazing Race is a point of comparison, but the biggest differentiator of Jet Lag is that it’s fundamentally a game, often involving dice, cards, challenges, and most of all, chance. Ahead of each season, the team sits down and brainstorms ideas, debating about game design choices while attempting to predict hurdles and opportunities to provide spectacle to the audience. Of course, they can only anticipate so much—an occurrence as small as a train delay can start a domino effect.

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Jet Lag: The Game

My discovery of Jet Lag was, in hindsight, quite thematic. I didn’t know about the show until late January of this year, when a friend who came from England to visit me in Argentina told me about it. We marathoned a few seasons together while eating copious amounts of takeout. And then we traveled together to Misiones to see the Iguazu Falls. For the most part, we planned things thoroughly, but there was a lot we couldn’t possibly predict ahead of time. The toilet in the place we stayed was broken for half of our stay. All the food we had sucked. A bird sanctuary we wanted to visit was not only unexpectedly closed, despite Google Maps saying otherwise, but it also started pouring rain shortly afterwards, which would have ruined it anyway. Then, on our way to the airport, the driver who had gone above and beyond for us since we got to Misiones did small talk once more, this time about his not-so-great perspective and understanding of trans folks. It was the one conversation I didn’t bother to translate from Spanish.

The clash of the unexpected is even more poignant for the Jet Lag crew. After all, the teams are trying to complete objectives within a limited period of time, which can range from a day to almost a week. They build snowmen, guess ramen flavors blindfolded, and recite songs from memory. Above all, they travel. While some seasons feature the occasional trip by car, the group deliberately picks locations that have, in their words, strong, frequent, and reliable, or semi reliable, public transportation. (Said locations must also be generally safe and offer accommodation options, as the participants have a rest period at the end of each day, and need to be able to book a room to spend the night somewhere.)

Witnessing how the participants plan around schedules and itineraries that can change at any time makes for an engrossing watch. It’s one of the reasons why the show is ridiculously popular. The YouTube channel has 912,000 subscribers and over 100 million total views at the time of publication. That’s without considering Nebula, a video-on-demand streaming service where Jet Lag is primarily hosted, which has traffic spikes whenever a new episode is released (which come out a week earlier than YouTube) and has since poached Denby as chief content officer. People take seasons seriously, too—that Variety interview I linked in the previous paragraph even has a spoiler tag at the beginning of the article.

One of the standout aspects of the show is that there are no actual prizes. There’s always a joke at the end of each season in which the winner(s) are awarded a digital trophy, and that’s about it. The core group has spoken at length about how, while the rapport has led to friendships, they still operate as a company. There’s a clear monetary return, as well as notoriety for each guest as internet personalities. When you’re watching an episode, though, whether it is the ridiculous amount of travel that the ordinary person doesn’t get to experience, or highlight moments like playing “Ode to Joy” while blowing on empty glass bottles, each with varying amounts of liquid to evoke different music notes, it’s clear that they do it for the love of the game.

This gamification of travel, and how the participants recontextualize the experience of exploring a city, takes a different consideration than your usual board game. After all, even though there are similarities in terms of game design and rules, the seasons—or sessions—don’t happen in a vacuum. Jet Lag’s novel premise means the group is playing while locals are commuting to work, or experiencing significant world events, rather than sitting around a living room table. During the beginning of the show, it’s easy to tell when this is constantly on the participants’ minds; at the beginning of “We Played A 96 Hour Game Of Capture The Flag Across Japan,” the players are apologizing to bystanders, perpetually repeating “sumimasen” while zig-zagging people to get to a train on time. As time passes, however, they begin to sideline important social etiquette, speaking loudly and eating in trains, for example. These actions aren’t wrong per se, but the focus on the game itself engulfs their surroundings. Cities effectively become playgrounds.

In the finale of “We Raced To Visit The Most European Countries In 6 Days,” one of the teams finds itself in Oslo, Norway. Upon landing, the group is tasked with a challenge to “appreciate your surroundings.” It’s a reference to the Norwegian idea of “kos,” which means: “Embracing peace and happiness, being in the moment, and fully appreciating the surroundings you find yourself in.” Thus, the challenge asks both participants to pick a place. One of them must write a list of 10 things, while the other must draw. To succeed, all 10 things listed from the surroundings must be in the drawing. The place chosen for this is close to the Oslo Opera House—when they arrive, the sun is setting, and the camera shot captures the brimming reflection on the surrounding water perfectly.

As a viewer, the shot made for a touching moment, and it’s clear the production team understood the assignment, creating a subtle timelapse with an emotive song in the background. But for the participants, this is just another challenge. They’re focused on accomplishing the task at hand before deciding the next step. It’s interesting, then, how guests, who might have seen prior seasons but not taken part in the game until then, are usually the ones who pop this bubble. That same season, guest Tom Scott makes a poignant remark. After the opposing team has completed the “Ode to Joy” challenge I mentioned before, Scott and Denby are planning their next move in a train station. Then, a train comes in, which plays musical notes while heading toward Kyiv, Ukraine. Denby says that they could have used it as an instrument for the challenge, to which Scott replies: “Joking aside, it does put it all a bit in perspective, doesn’t it? We’re getting to do all this travel, all these countries… and that’s heading to a country at war.”

Watching Jet Lag has been a learning experience. When traveling, it’s easy to fall into a gamified state of mind when making plans and deciding on routes, especially when having specific overarching goals ahead of time. But it’s important to leave room for the unexpected; some moments will occur without your input, while others might require you to bend the rules imposed by your past self to make them happen. Navigating other people’s homes and transiting their commutes is a privilege and an experience that can lead to dozens of unique anecdotes. Albeit only temporary, you’re a part of it, of the everyday triumphs and the everyday struggles. You can only appreciate your surroundings if you look at the whole picture.

Diego Nicolás Argüello is a freelance journalist from Argentina who has learned English thanks to videogames. You can read his work in places like Polygon, the New York Times, The Verge, and more. You can also find him on Bluesky.