The Game
As I hinted the other day, we - Ruth, JTA, the kids and I - spent a long weekend in London playing the "home game" version of Jet Lag: The Game - Hide & Seek. I've long been a fan of the show1 and snapped up the game and its expansion pack as soon as they became available in metric units, but I only just now got the opportunity to properly play them.
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A smiling family including Dan pose for a group selfie in front of a red brick wall.
Nominally, this was Ruth's birthday weekend, and we had a handful of other activities planned2, but Jet Leg occupied the lion's share of our time. We'd established a ruleset that felt like it would work for us, given (among other factors) the the fact that some of our teammates are younger! But for the most part, this was a "medium"-scale game, played over two days... kind-of a parallel of season 13.5 of the show (New York City).
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Map showing zone 1-9 transit stations within the M25, alongside a summary of Jet Lag seeker question categories.
Seeking
We started the first round at King's Cross, with Ruth and the younger child hiding first. JTA, the elder child and I chilled out for an hour at Paul, then begun our search. In an effort to quickly split the search area, we asked our first question:
And so we set off to the West. Next, we figured, we'd use our harder-to-exploit 5km thermometer - an "am I getting hotter or colder" test - to try to bisect our new search area by taking the Jubilee Line to the North-West: slow and methodical. As we got ourselves into position, we requested a photo that we figured might prove useful later.
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Scrubby ground and concrete.
We got up to near Wembley and played hotter-colder, and got... hotter. Wow, we thought, this was all going better than expected! We were now able to draw a diagonal line across West London, from about Weybridge in the South up to Enfield in the North, on the West side of which our quarry must lie. Most of the in-play stations lay between us and Watford, up towards the extreme ends of the Jubilee Line and the Metropolitan Line.
Sure, there were a handful of exceptions still in play, out at the ends of the Elizabeth Line, Piccadilly Line, and bits of the Overground... but far-more candidates were right up here in the North-West, with us. We were clearly doing well. And our suspicions were confirmed when the hiders hit us with our first curse:
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'Curse of the ransom note', spelled out line a ransom note and with its card alongside.
Several questions and much back-and-forth up the Metropolitan Line later, we realised our mistake: we'd gotten target-lock, and and had allowed ourselves to be thrown off-course by our assumption that being cursed by the hiders was a clue that we were on the right track. We weren't even on the right line. We'd made a foolish assumption, and it had cost us probably an hour4.
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A man and a tweenager work together to cut words from a magazine.
Only after we'd eliminated from play almost the entirety of North-West London did we stop, in desperation, to look at all the clues we'd gathered already. And that's when we spotted a giveaway clue. Do you remember that photo of a "park"?
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Scrubby ground and concrete.
Sitting near the centre of the photo, hidden only because it blends in with the railing behind it... is an airport luggage trolley! Of course they're closer to Heathrow than we are... the sneaky buggers were at the actual airport!
Unfortunately, getting to Heathrow Airport from way up the wrong branch of the Metropolitan Line is... not easy. So we opted to stick to the surface level, picking a route via an overground train and a series of buses to get across to the Elizabeth Line and a route to victory. We had them now, surely! Wrapping our coats tightly around us as the rain hammered down, we set out into the West London streets.
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The 'Curse of the Jammed Door' card.
I can tell you with confidence that there is little that's more-demoralising than waiting in a queue in the rain for a bus only for it to arrive... and then, because you roll a 3 on your dice, having to return to the back of the queue and try again with the next bus. All while a crowd of bemused spectators look on with what might charitably be described as pity.
We eventually made it to the airport and, after an extended search, further curses, and much elimination, eventually found the hiders on the departures floor of Terminal 4.
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A tweenager indicates on a freestanding map the point on the Piccadilly Line at which Heathrow Airport begins.
The hiders had been camped-out in the terminal building all day, which is a draining experience even when it's just a delayed flight that's stopping you from going on holiday. Ruth and the younger child had to hang out at Heathrow for a day and didn't even get to travel anywhere at the end of it, the poor things!
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A family smiles for the camera in an generic-looking airport corridor.
I declared the experience of being seekers to be a mixture of the first two types of fun: about 75% type I fun, about 25% type II fun. My teammates might give it a less-generous ratio!
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Map showing a journey from King's Cross to and around Heathrow airport, taking a circuitous route via Harrow.
Hiding
On our run as seekers we'd found it challenging and stressful to run around (often in the rain!), measuring distances, bisecting maps, navigating transit, deciphering the hidden information in clues, and counteracting curses. Now that it was our turn to be hiders, we were looking forward to a more-chill hangout.
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Dan is accompanied by his team in a subterranean tunnel signposted "Elizabeth Line".
We decided to be "clever" about our hiding zone and opted for Angel, because:
- it's relatively central to the play area, making bisections harder, but
- it's still more than a kilometre from any other underground station, maximising our hiding zone by eliminating "overlaps",
- the visually-tallest building from the station entrance isn't distinctive unless you already know what it is (it's the old Angel Picture Theatre!), and looks more like it belongs our Greenwich way,
- it's only on the Northern Line, which awkwardly forks (limiting the value of "same transit line" checks) and it isn't an interchange station (reducing the risk of accidental endgaming), and
- most-importantly, it's a lot less-boring a part of London to hang out for a day than Heathrow T4!
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The new hiding team sits in a pub.
The search began in earnest the following morning, with the seekers undertaking a series of bisections to try to rapidly narrow-down the search space. I didn't envy Ruth, who not only had to wrangle a nine-year-old around London but simultaneously do the kind of research with one phone that my team had been doing using three!
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Three park benches with engravings and a sculpture of a cat sitting on a book.
Meanwhile, we explored our hiding zone. At the far South end we found the Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration, where - once we were done running around taking photos - we enjoyed their exhibition on the comic art of queer artists. (At least, until I had to sprint back to the station for one more photo request from the seekers!)
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Dan holding a fan of 'time bonus' cards.
While we waited in our got exceptionally lucky with our first few card pulls, earning significant time bonuses and some curses that we'd eventually play to fun effect. My personal favourite was playing Curse of the Lemon Phylactery, forcing the seekers to go into a Tesco and buy lemons and sellotape and attach the fruits to their bodies... and then, right after they'd had time to do that, following-up with Curse of the Water Weight, requiring them to return to the same supermarket, now wearing lemons, and buy large bottles of water to carry with them for the rest of the day. Hilarious.
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The second-round seekers' team with lemons taped to their bodies.
We further delayed the seekers when we managed to pull Curse of the Zoologist and, with the help of a snail we found, forced the seekers to go hunting around Green Park for an invertebrate of their own before they could proceed.
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Close-up of a snail on a leaf.
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'Curse of the Zoologist' card.
Our curses eventually betrayed us. That water weight curse? You can only play it when you're within 300 metres of water, and Ruth managed to use this fact to cut down the search space significantly. Riding up the depths of the Northern Line, her movements were basically invisible until she popped out at Angel and locked us into our hiding place in the shopping centre nearest the station.
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View through the window of a Pret cafe.
Eventually, thanks to the Pret-related distraction and a healthy hand of time bonuses, my team hiding on the second round scored a time of about ten minutes longer than the first round: a victory, but only barely!7
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In a busy shopping centre a young boy points towards the camera while his mother carries a bottle of water alongside.
Lessons
So what did we learn from this, our first outing to play Jet Lag: Hide & Seek for ourselves?
- A "medium" game like this is a hard thing to start with! We got by, but if we didn't have the benefit of a strong familiarity with the show, we'd have been better to start with a "small" game covering e.g. only zone 1.
- A "medium" game might be the most intellectually-tiring size to play. A large game would seem to provide the likelihood of long train journeys during which you can strategise and calculate. A small game probably reduces the time pressure enough that it's worth stopping from time to time to reassess your situation. But in a medium game, we found that the seekers were always on the move and working out their next move: it's a lot to juggle at once!
- It's a lot more-stressful to be the seekers than the hiders, but hiding isn't without its tense moments either, especially if you're trying to make the best of your curse cards. And a team of seekers with only one mobile device is at a disadvantage to a team with two or three.
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A family take a selfie in a steak restaurant, leaning to fit into the frame.
- It's important to focus on the fun, first and foremost. Especially when playing with children, it's more valuable to make sure that everybody's having fun than that everybody's playing in a fair-but-competitive way. We made a couple of minor tweaks to the clues we provided in an ad hoc manner, as we played, in order to retain balance (although fewer than you might think!).
- Your choice of hiding zone has an impact on how enjoyable it is to hang out there. Again, especially with children, it's worth asking yourself how long their attention span is and how capable they are of entertaining themselves while waiting for hours at, say, an airport.
- There are about three times as many Pret outlets than you'd expect within 500m of Angel station. Why, Islington, why!?
I think it's fair to say that we'd absolutely play again, taking forward the lessons we've learned from this game. But we might need some rest and recovery time first: it's surprisingly exhausting!
If you think this game could be for you... then you're probably right! But you should probably go enjoy the show first: the latest series, Japanorama, enjoys some of the best and most-compelling editing of any season so far and it's worth your time.
Footnotes
1 Jet Lag: The Game is one of a handful of productions, along with e.g. Philosophy Tube - I've plugged both before e.g. here and there - that contributed to my acquisition of lifetime membership of Nebula.
2 Secondary activities included Hadestown (for the second time, for a few of us), Ghosts: The Possession of Button House, and plenty of opportunities to overindulge in fancy meals and drinks.
3 I'd intended to ask about whether their nearest airport, like ours, was City (figuring they'd have been unlikely to make it near to Luton or Gatwick, and that this would then split the city one-third/two-thirds), but we asked the wrong question. In any case, it worked out.
4 Pedants who were there with me, plodding across London in the rain, might note that I've taken a couple of liberties with the order-of-events in my storytelling. I promise that this was not done to make us look any smarter, and our exact level of foolishness remains intact.
5 Fans of the show might note that our hiders' strategy was a little like that of Sam in Season 12, who opted to hide at Narita Airport only to be exposed by the photo question about the tallest structure... which turned out to be the control tower.
6 Per the rules of the game, all invertebrates are bugs, even those that aren't "true bugs" or even insects.
7 Our victory was probably more-than offset by the additional handicap experienced by the smaller, less well-equipped team of Ruth and the younger child!
๐ We Played Hide & Seek across Greater London (https://danq.me/2026/10/28/hide-and-seek-london-2/) Absolutely delightful.
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