Jet Lag: The Game - TV Tropes (2025)

We play games where the world is our board.

Jet Lag: The Game is a travel-centered reality competition by Wendover Productions. 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, 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.

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, Switzerland.
• 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 (May 2024): Au$tralia. In a format somewhat similar to Season 4, Sam and Toby race against Ben and Adam to gain control over Australian territories by investing money to "claim" them. Notably, spending money for controlling territories and travelling both come out of the same budget, and challenges in this season are not free, requiring teams to wager their budget to earn more money.
• Season 11 (August 2024): Tag EUR It 3. Same format as Seasons 3 and 7, but in a new region. Starting from Ferrara, Italy, Sam is going for Lyon, France; Ben going for Capri, Italy; and Adam is aiming for Bratislava, Slovakia.
• Season 12: (December 2024): Hide + Seek: Japan. A variant of Hide + Seek that takes place in Japan. Sam, Adam and Ben take turns as hiders and seekers again, but the coins and dice curses from Season 9 have been replaced by a deck of curses, powerups, and other bonuses that the hider draws from whenever they truthfully answer a question the seekers ask them. The player with the longest single run as the hider after six days wins.
• Season 13 (March 2025): Schengen Showdown. Sam and Tom Scott battle Ben and Adam in a variant of "Battle 4 America" to claim the most nations within the Schengen Area.

DOCUMENT TROPES WITHIN JET LAG:

• Accidental Discovery: Happens twice in Hide + Seek: Japan.
  • During Adam's first run, Sam and Ben ask Adam for a photo of the tallest building from his train station, which they aren't allowed to use Google Street View to find. Later, after narrowing Adam's range down to the Utsunomiya metro area, Sam sees the Tobiyama Castle Site Station on Google Maps, and clicks on it, figuring that Adam enjoys visiting castles – and the image that pops up shows the building.
  • During Sam's first run, he hides at Higashi-Narita station, a train station originally built to serve Narita Airport but now superseded by the terminal stations; as such, very few people use that station. However, Ben and Adam accidentally get on the train to that station, walk toward the wrong exit, and find Sam immediately.
• 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
• Achievements in Ignorance: In the last episode of season 7 Ben escapes Sam and Adam at a station when he gets off the train they have just boarded, and it departs before they could search the train and get off. They assume he saw them and got off the train to escape them. In fact Ben had no idea that they were at the station, and remains blissfully ignorant until the end of the game that he came this close to being caught, to the shock of all three.
  • This happens again in Season 11... twice: Adam switches trains early, hoping to trick Sam and Ben waiting further down the line into searching the wrong train, as they're both heading to the same station. Unbeknownst to him, however, the two chasers were already waiting at his transfer station to catch him, but he manages to slip past without even realising they're there, and they board the other train thinking he's hiding onboard. This immediately happens again when the two trains arrive in Padua, with Sam and Ben arriving first, ready to tag Adam, who once again manages to slip past, unaware of the danger he's in. There's even a handy infographic showing how, by sheer dumb luck, Adam was just out of the chasers' line of sight when leaving the train.
• All for Nothing:
  • In episode 6 of season 6, Ben and Adam spend most of that episode 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.
    • 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.
  • In Season 12, Sam's very first card pull of his final run is the one gives him 1 hour to move his hiding spot to wherever he wants; this card nearly wasn't included in the season at all as they were worried it was too game-breaking. Despite playing it at the perfect time to get right out from under Ben and Adam's nose, he isn't able to get far enough away and Ben and Adam are quickly able to narrow down his new hiding spot and catch him soon enough that he doesn't even get second place.
• The Alleged Car: For the "make a go-kart" challenge in season two, Ben and 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:
  • In Crime Spree, Sam's quest to break enough laws ends anticlimactically when his cameraman/judge JT gets food poisoning and Sam decides to pull out of the game, one point short of what he needed to win. He does still technically end up winning, but only because Ben and Adam decided later on that JT not eating for over 20 hours counted as a violation of Oregon's labor law.
  • Season 2 ends on one. Sam and Joseph's plan hinges on completing a bungee jump challenge in Singapore to get them onward travel to South Korea. This fails when Ben and Adam complete both that challenge and the "Eat at a Michelin-starred restaurant" challenge before Sam and Joseph. While Ben and Adam safely secure their onward travel to Australia, Sam and 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.
• Audience Participation: Some challenges' outcomes have been decided by social media polls, such as the "draw the best portrait of George Washington" battle challenge in Season 4 where the winner was decided by which team's portrait got the most votes on Twitter.
• 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, not to mention how long the boarding process is with things like check-in queues and security.
  • 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: Switzerland 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}. Comes to a head in the finale, where Adam manages to win the entire game without buying any curses during his final run. When they redid Hide & Seek in season 12, the dice got replaced with a card deck system.
  • Sam falls victim to this in his first run in Hide + Seek: Japan. He plays "Curse of the Impressionable Consumer" (forcing the seekers to buy something they saw an advertisement for) and "Curse of the Right Turn" (banning the seekers from turning left on public streets), figuring that the second card will make it very difficult and frustrating to clear the first card. It doesn't work because Ben and Adam are at Tokyo Station, and so they just search the station for ads and watch an ad screen for ten minutes, and then when it shows an ad for Coca-Cola, they just go to a convenience store next to the station.
• 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.
• Beneath Notice: Ben's game winning train in season 7 is this; it is so illogical from the chasers' perspective that they don't even notice it until after the train has already left, with Ben onboard.
• 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 and Michelle complete challenges, including one that lets a team steal a ticket from their opponents' hand.
  • Sam and 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.
• "Blind Idiot" Translation: In-Universe. The cafe in Hospental (in German-speaking Switzerland) where Adam hangs out in Hide + Seek has an "open" sign in German, French, English, and Italian. The French word on the sign is ouvrir, which is actually a verb meaning "to open"; the correct French word would be ouvert.
• Briar Patching: In Season 13, Sam and Tom fail the Netherlands challenge which involves gathering a selection of flowers for a bouquet as requested by Jason of Not Just Bikes, but because the challenge includes Christmas roses which were not in season at the time of filming (January 2025), the two figure it's actually impossible for anyone to complete the challenge. By rule they have to call Adam and Ben to let them know of their failure, but they play up their disappointment in doing so during their call as well as they can in order to put the idea of stealing the Netherlands into Adam and Ben's head, not knowing that it's actually impossible (at least by Sam and Tom's reckoning); their hope is that this might cause them to waste time later on in the game by going to the Netherlands to try the seemingly-impossible challenge because Adam and Ben don't know yet what it is.
• 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. It comes back again in Season 10 Episode 5, when Ben and Adam reference Dune and the power of the desert (being in the outback of Alice Springs at the time).
  • 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.
  • The finale of Season 11. Sam, having effectively won the game by reaching Göschenen deep into Switzerland, decided to take a train to Hospental for fun, and ends his run and the game at the same castle where Adam was caught in Season 9.
  • Season 13 has a couple:
    • In Episode 2, Sam and Tom go to Brussels Airport, and Sam asks Tom "Are humans animals?", a reference to the Loophole Abuse from Season 3 Episode 5 where Sam interpreted the "Touch an animal that's not a pet" challenge card to include humans, tagging Ben at that same train station to complete the challenge.
    • In Episode 3, this is Invoked by Switzerland's challenge card in which the players have to recite word-for-word a 90-second clip of a section from a previous season of Jet Lag. Ben and Adam complete the challenge by recreating a scene from Season 9 when Sam and Adam were at Zug station trying to find Ben while sitting at a bench waiting for the next train.
• 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 Gun:
  • It's mentioned early in Season 10 that the Gold Coast airport lies precisely on the border between two Australian states. This proves to be the deciding factor in Sam and Toby's victory when they can walk across the border and steal the last state needed to secure their victory.
  • An earlier episode of the same season also has Ben and Adam mistakenly believing that their flight is departing from Tullamarine Airport, when is actually Melbourne's smaller airport, Avalon. Keen-eyed viewers can catch in the finale that Ben and Adam believe their victory is assured when they see Sam and Toby leaving from Melbourne, because the only flight out of Tullamarine they could be taking would be to Tasmania... as Sam and Toby walk past the Avalon sign, with the same mistake again foreshadowing that Badam had actually been outplayed.
• 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.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: In-Universe. Certain options basically never get used, even if in retrospect they would have been a good idea, because players tend to find a strategy and stick with it until it breaks. They deliberately adjusted the price for the "track the chasers" powerup in the third Tag to try and incentivise someone to use it and still no one did. ^note
• 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 When he decides to actively resist this tendency in the New Zealand season, things go better for him almost immediately. However, this strategy actually wins him Season 11.
• 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.
• Contrived Coincidence: In episode 6 of Season 11, as Sam and Ben are hunting Adam, Ben suddenly stops having noticed something on the floor - namely, two discarded Jet Lag challenge cards. It isn't a clue of Adam's presence, though, as Sam suspects - Ben points out that those are challenges that he did during one of his own runs, and dropped on a previous visit to that town. They just happened to walk back past that spot and the cards happened to still be there.
• 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. The seasons usually end with the winner being 'given' a trophy of some sort which is actually an obvious graphic to be edited in afterwards, so the players mime out various silly actions involving the trophy like throwing it, inflating it, dropping it, having it flown in from above, etc.
• Covers Always Lie: The thumbnail for Arctic Escape E3 shows Ben and Adam with a departure board that says "C27 / FLIGHT 1607 / TICKET SALES CLOSED". Their actual flight was numbered 741 and left from Gate B8.
• Crazy-Prepared: Ben prepared for his second run in Season 12 with a ghillie suit. Unfortunately despite having the environment and light levels on his side, the status light on his microphone ends up giving away his position.
• Credits Gag: When introducing the players, the trailer for Schengen Showdown shows Tom doing jumping jacks. The letters in "TOM" then start jumping like Tom himself.
• 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.
  • In season eleven, Sam pulls a high-value curse right after using a powerup that doubles the amount of coins he'd get from it. The curse prevents him from using his phone to look up transport schedules, which he's happy to go along with, because he expects to be caught quickly, and his aim is to get as many coins in the bank as possible in the hope of getting a second run.
  • In season 12, the chasers Ben and Adam have their train in Japan of all places be delayed while trying to find Sam. This turns out to actually be beneficial for them because while waiting for this train, they're able to ask questions that rule out getting on the train at all, meaning they didn't spend half their day taking a slow regional train to the middle of nowhere for nothing.
• Darkest Hour: Happens to Sam and Michelle at the end of Arctic Escape E5. Ben and 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 and Michelle's only hope of winning is to steal a ticket from Ben and 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 and 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 and 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.
• Deadpan Snarker: Adam gets some awful card pulling luck in Episode 6 of Season 12, getting nothing but time bonuses at the beginning of his second run (time bonuses are preferable when the hider is close to being caught, but in the beginning curses are much more preferable to hinder the seekers). He pretends to be enthusiastic (while clearly sarcastic) every time it happens at first.
• 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: Happens suprisingly often. All of these are justified, of course, since this is an unscripted reality show.
  • 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^note. 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.
  • Season 11 concludes with another. Faced with a long detour to get into his win zone followed by passing through a choke point at Milan which the chasers are bound to arrive at first, Sam manages to invert his usual luck of being screwed by train delays by catching a 45 minute late high speed train direct from his current location that the chasers can't hope to catch up with, allowing him to get deep into Switzerland and well out of range of the other two win zones.
  • Deutsche Bahn once again rears its ugly head in Season 13 Episode 1, when Sam and Tom are hoping to be able to get trains from Maastricht to Cologne (to put themselves within easy reach of an airport for Day 2) but their train to Aachen gets cancelled due to lack of rolling stock, forcing them to go back to Brussels (where the flights are more expensive). This is after multiple flashbacks to the show's prior tribulations with the company and everyone frequently pointing out just how unreliable it is.
  • An example that ultimately has no impact on the game itself, but in Season 13 Episode 3, Ben accidentally leaves his phone on a Swiss train that they got off in Liechtenstein. As it turns out, not only were Sam and Tom able to use the teams having a tracker on each other to identify where the train the phone was on appeared to have stopped, but Ben's friend just happened to be in Switzerland at the time and was able to swing by and pick it up.
• 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 and Toby sneak up to the route that Ben and 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 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 system.
    • Season 10 will bring back the use of exact dollar amounts; this is justified as the season is based around budget management.
    • 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 six seasons (3, 5, 6, 7, 9 and 11) have now been filmed entirely in one time zone each.
• Easter Egg: Amy's Puzzle Box can be scanned, which leads to the same site that Sam was directed to, as well as a new challenge for the viewer to solve. (Link to website)
• Eat That:
  • In Tag EUR It, a challenge requires the runner to eat a meal at the worst-reviewed restaurant on TripAdvisor within a certain radius.
  • One of the challenges for Tag EUR It 3 requires the runner to obtain a piece of ravioli and an Oreo, swap their fillings, and eat both of them.
  • A card in Tag EUR It 3 requires the runner to eat the card.
• 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.
• "Everybody Laughs" Ending; Starting with season 3, each season has ended with the contestants whooping and ecstatically running around regardless of who wins.
• Exhaustion-Induced Idiocy: Sam's entire second run in Season 12 can be considered this, most likely due to the game being in its sixth day, combined with the intense summer heat in Tokyo.
  • Sam drew the potentially game-breaking 'Move' Card at the start of his run, which enabled him to move to any place he liked within one hour from his hiding spot. Rather than meticulously calculating and researching for potential hiding spots, Sam instead randomly went to another station in Tokyo, a move which ultimately only bought him another three hours, far from enough to secure him the win. Furthermore, Sam would not play Curse of the Jammed Door, a curse which was proven to be effective by both of Ben's runs (and formed an even more lethal combination with his already-played Curse of the Urban Explorer, which required the seekers to leave the train station to ask questions). He would also not veto the tallest building question even though Sam knew that the building was incredibly distinctive, and that at the time, Ben and Adam only knew that Sam was in Urawa, and not which station he was closest to. To top it all off, Sam would discard both of those cards above, and instead bank on drawing time bonuses, even though he still had to survive for another 3.5 hours before his time bonuses would have won him the game.
• Failed a Spot Check: Sam eventually has to veto completing Amy's Puzzle Box in Season 11 because it completely stumps him. After calling Amy to find what the answer was, it emerges that because he'd unlocked a series of puzzle pieces in one location but took transport before attempting to assemble them, one of the pieces had gotten caught in his pocket.
• Failure Gambit: In season 13, the challenge for France involves creating a mini museum which at least five people visit but no one spends any time in.
• 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.
    • The rugby challenge is briefly shown again in Season 10 when Sam and Toby explain why they don't want to try a similar challenge.
  • 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.
• Foreshadowing: In Season 13 episode 1, it's brought up at multiple points how many times Deutsche Bahn has screwed Jet Lag over and that they shouldn't rely on the company for tight connections. Lo and behold, a train crucial to Sam and Tom's plan gets cancelled.
• Formula-Breaking Episode: Within the "Hide + Seek" seasons the hider's location is hidden from the audience until the seekers have zeroed in on the area they are hiding in, allowing the veiwer to try and figure out alongside the seekers where the hider is. This format is broken with episode 3 of season 12 sees Sam hiding at Narita Airport, which is revealed early in the episode when Badam ask if his nearest airport is the same as theirs, which it was, meaning that the audience are well aware of where Sam is hiding, and the episode gains a level of tension and Dramatic Irony as we see how close, or far, the boys are from finding him.
• 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^* " 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.
  • The first episode of Season 11 has one of these:
    • Adam is on a train to Udine, Italy, and the chasers Ben and Sam are trying to catch a train that also goes there. Unfortunately, they can't book tickets on that train digitally, and when they buy physical tickets they then miss the train. However, Adam doesn't know that they didn't make that train, and is so worried that he gets off his train at a tiny town called Susegana (since going all the way to Udine would have meant almost certainly getting caught). He considers this to be a good thing for him, however, as the town is so obscure as it would take Sam and Ben a while to figure out how to get there.
    • Sam and Ben find a train ticket to Susegana, which would get there before Adam can take a train out of there. However, Adam isn't planning on taking a train out of Susegana at all, and instead takes a bus to another tiny town called Conegliano where he can hopefully connect to another town called Gorizia on the border with Slovenia. The chasers don't know that he is going to Conegliano and thus aren't able to get on a faster train that would have gone directly there. After examining their options, they decide to take a train directly to Trieste to try and get ahead of Adam. Adam, for his part, thinks that Sam and Ben have taken the train up to Conegliano.
    • Since Adam's plan was never to go to Trieste at all, he's able to safely get into Gorizia where he plans to walk across the border into Slovenia and take a train from there. However, the chasers have also realized this, and thus get off their train in Monfalcone to catch a connection to Gorizia, where they're ultimately able to catch Adam.
  • Sam's first run in Season 11 ends with one of these. He's trying to get to Lyon, France, from the direction of Monfalcone in Italy.
    • Sam has a strategic destination in mind to end the day, the town of Bassano del Grappa, reached by boarding multiple trains to major destinations and then transferring before those destinations. From Bassano del Grappa his initial plan is to be able to fake out going in one direction and then go in the other. By the morning, his plan has changed, and in the belief that Ben and Adam are arriving in the town imminently, he decides to rack up as many coins as possible to prepare for his second run (in the hope that he gets one).
    • However, Ben and Adam don't consider Bassano del Grappa to be Sam's intended destination, instead believing that his aim is to take a train through the Alps to Trento, and they discover a combination of trains that Sam can use to reach Trento in the morning from a stop further up the line, a combination that Sam is unaware of. From their position on a train towards Vicenza, they work out that their fastest route to Trento is to go a different route through Verona.
    • Not being caught throws Sam for a loop, and he ultimately boards the train to Trento, allowing Ben and Adam to ambush him on the platform when his train pulls in.
• Game-Breaker:
  • The roadblocks in Season 5 turned out to be this, as pointed out by many fans. They're very cheap to pull at only 15 coins and have a devastating impact when played on long stretches of road without any shops or services.
  • Discussed in Season 12 with the "Move" card, which allows the hider to change his hiding spot and freezes the seekers in place for an hour once they arrive at his original hiding area. When the game was being developed, there was serious discussion about whether or not to include this card, since allowing the hider to change his hiding spot had the potential to completely break the game. In the final game, there are several stipulations to using the card which prevent its abuse. To start with, the hider has only one copy of the card in the deck, limiting his chances of drawing it. Once he decides to use it, he must reveal his station to the seekers and discard his entire hand. It also cannot be used at all during the endgame (i.e., once the seekers reach the hider's station).
• 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 and 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 and Ben are fooled by this, and they realize that they have no way of finding Sam and JT at this point, so they decide to turn in for the night... at the Boston Airport Hotel.
• Heterosexual Life-Partners: Ben and Adam are best friends who work together as a team and not a couple, though they are sometimes mistaken for one by viewers (especially before the episode where Adam called his girlfriend).
• Honor Before Reason:
  • In Tag EUR It, Adam pulls a card that prevents him from using his phone for most purposes. It's been generally agreed that he interpreted this card a lot more harshly than he needed to and that getting his locked debit card dealt with would have qualified as an "emergency" allowing him to use his phone. The "walk a mile" challenge also likely would have allowed Adam to use his phone to make sure he had actually gone the requisite distance. Even with this self-imposed handicap, he still likely would have escaped Paris if not for his huge mistake with his disguise.
  • 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, 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.
• Humiliation Conga: Season 10 Episode 2 has one for Ben and Adam. Having finished Day 1 on a high, they then proceed to get on the wrong bus out of Adelaide airport, get 40% of their money stolen by Sam and Toby, then flub multiple challenges causing them to lose even more money (which turns out to be a bigger deal where they are because all of the flights back out of Adelaide are really expensive).
• 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:
  • The veto option for challenges can effectively be this. All challenge cards in seasons 3, 6, 7, and 11 have a veto period of 30 minutes (Season 1 gave the teams two consequence-free vetoes each, and Season 5 had variable veto periods between 15 minutes and four hours depending on the difficulty of the challenge and 30-minute penalties for vetoing roadblocks) if the person using them decides the challenge isn't possible for their location or doesn't make sense logistically, and some challenges have a limited number of attempts before an enforced veto in the case of failure.
    • The first episode of Season 11 arguably features one of the few cases where an entirely doable challenge was intentionally vetoed out of frustration. The challenge was to flip a coin and get heads seven times in a row with unlimited attempts, which is theoretically a 1/128 chance. After flipping the coin almost 700 times and only ever getting to six heads in a row (a 1/64 chance) on three different occasions, Adam decided to just take the veto penalty so that he could still catch his bus out of the town.^note
  • During the last day of Crime Spree, Ben and Adam no longer have enough budget to follow Sam to Portland where he can commit the final three crimes he needs to win, so they concede defeat and spend the remaining hours enjoying Virginia Beach with the rest of their budget. They still end up winning due to Sam deciding to stop the game early because of JT's food poisoning, but they decide to use a loophole to give Sam the last point he needs to win.
  • 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.
  • At the end of season 9, the seekers Sam and Ben find themselves at a complete loss trying to figure out where Adam is (as his ultimately successful strategy relied on them discarding his actual location as impossible) with Adam's victory drawing ever closer. Sam and Ben seem to accept their inevitable defeat and spend the rest of the afternoon making Adam do the most annoying challenges on the list while enjoying Switzerland for themselves.
• The Law of Conservation of Detail:
  • In the last episode of season 1, Sam and Brian spend some time in transit discussing the challenge cards they might face at their destination. One card they are shown discussing in detail would allow them to claim the state they're in instantly at the cost of a handicap on their travel to the next state; they note that it would be a lucky card to pull as the last challenge of the game, when the cost would be irrelevant. In the event, they pull that exact card to claim Montana and win the game.
  • 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 and 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 and Adam to claim Utah, ensuring that if they claim Montana, then they win. Ultimately subverted when Sam and Brian claim Montana first.
  • New Zealand:
    • Sam and 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 and Michelle steal Ben and 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.
  • Hide + Seek Japan: Two from Episode 3:
    • Sam is the hider and Ben and Adam are trying to figure out where he is. They plan to get on a slow regional train to where they think he is hiding, but this train is delayed (in Japan of all places). They decide to use the time waiting for their train to arrive to ask more questions and uncover enough information that they decide not to get on the train at all (which would have been a massive time loss).
    • Later on in the episode, Sam decides to make his final hiding place Higashi-Narita station, a tiny, obscure railway station under Narita Airport that was rendered obsolete in the 1990s when a larger, better-connected station was built. Ben and Adam proceed to get on the wrong train...which takes them directly to Higashi-Narita station.
• 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.
  • 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 overtime without sufficient food breaks, over Sam's protestations that he wouldn't qualify for this since JT was a salaried employee.
  • 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.
  • 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 away from Sam) until after the tower penalty has elapsed in order to buy Adam as much time as possible to return with the flag.
  • In S13 E3, Sam and Tom have to play 10 rounds of 20 Questions while also counting their steps. For the first round, Sam chooses the two-of-hearts card. Then for the next round, Sam chooses the three-of-hearts-card, which Tom instantly guesses. He then chooses the four-of-hearts, and then the five-of-hearts, and so on.
• 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.
• Lucky Charms Title: Season 10 Au$tralia.
• 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 due to it resembling an entryway to someone's house, which leads to Sam and Adam repeatedly walking right past his hiding location for over an hour of searching.
  • Adam's second run in Season 11 has a similar chain of events to Ben's in Season 7.
    • With his initial plan ruined by an emergency services incident closing the line, Adam is forced to begin the last day in a bad location, with an upcoming choke point in Padua. He decides to do a sneaky train transfer in Montselice onto a slower train, in the hope that Sam and Ben misread the tracker and wait for the original train in Padua, allowing him to slip past them.
    • Unbeknownst to him, Sam and Ben use Montselice as their choke point. Mirroring Season 7, they get on the train as Adam gets off and they completely miss each other. However, the difference in movement lets them know that Adam is on the slower train, allowing them to reset their choke point to Padua.
    • At Padua, Adam transfers again. Though Sam and Ben have split up to cover more of the platform, they are stood in the perfect position to have Adam obscured by a pillar as he leaves the train and the platform, unable to see his precise movements owing to inaccuracies in the tracker. They wind up boarding the train in the belief that Adam is still on it, only to groan in frustration when - again - the tracker's movements divorce from their own.
  • During Ben's second run in season 12, Sam and Adam attempt to use a tentacle question, only for Ben to be slightly out of range to be ensnared. Not knowing this, Sam and Adam assume Ben is nowhere near, resulting in them leaving the area entirely, adding hours to Ben's run.
• Missed the Bus: Given how much the players use public transportation in each season, this trope inevitably occurs on a semi-regular basis.
  • One of the most Epic Fail cases of this occurred in Season 11 when Ben thought that a train he wanted to catch would be late so he stopped running to do some research on his phone, only for his train to leave on time without him.
• 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."
• Moon Logic Puzzle: Amy's Puzzle Box in Tag EUR It 3. The box has a 3-digit combination lock, and a QR code on the side that shows a webpage with three tweets. The code is 412, not from the datetimes, view counts, or any actual numbers, but because the first tweet contains the word "for", the second contains "won", and the third contains "too".
• 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).
• Now, Buy the Merchandise: In Season 12's first episode, Ben twice brings up their Hide and Seek transit game that's available to buy from Nebula's store and there's an amusing scene where Adam claims that being cursed to walk only 1-6 steps at a time is fun after Sam reminds him that they should be presenting their Hide and Seek game as something that'll be fun for viewers to play themselves.
• Obvious Rule Patch:
  • After JT fell ill from suspected food poisoning in Crime Spree, 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.
  • In Tag EUR It and Tag EUR It 2, runners had to pay the full value of their planned journey in coins, even if their train was cancelled (which happened a lot with Deutsche Bahn). Tag EUR It 3 modified the rule so if the runner's train is cancelled beyond their reasonable control, they are now refunded for any unused portion of their journey. The rule was invoked in episode 5, when Adam's train towards Venice was cancelled at Monselice due to a person vs train incident further up the line.
  • Season 12, the second Hide and Seek season, has the rule that hiders cannot hide more than 10 feet away from a marked path, which was likely added to prevent a repeat of the Season 9 incident where Sam hid in the middle of a forest and Ben and Adam spent over two hours searching for him in it. In addition, the largely useless curse dice from Season 9 have been replaced by a much more powerful deck of cards that the hider can draw a curse, powerup, or time bonus from every time they answer a seeker question.
• 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.
  • Episode 3 of Season 11 ends with one, as Ben sees that his intended train is delayed by five minutes and uses the time to sort through his things on the platform, only for the train to leave on time without him, forcing him to travel somewhere else.
  • Episode 4 of Season 12 has one for Sam and Adam, when Sam finds that while Google Maps had stated it wasn't possible for Ben to have reached the area south of Ito, so they'd written it off hours before, Apple Maps showed that it was perfectly possible (for some reason the Google planner didn't take the shinkansen into account).
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: Adam is well-known for being a gigantic bundle of nerves. Thus, Ben has no idea what to make of Adam's calm, zen-like demeanor as he prepares for the golf challenge in Alice Springs.
• 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.
• Rock Me, Amadeus!: The trailer for Schengen Showdown contains a synth-pop version of "Ode to Joy".
• 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. This has since come back usually at least once per following season.
  • Ben and/or Adam wearing Paper-Thin Disguises has featured more than once.
  • Ben has ended up drunk often, usually due to a challenge in seasons 1, 2, 4, and 5, although he and Adam chose to get drunk themselves in season 11. Others have also gotten drunk on other seasons, including Sam in Season 6 and both Adam and Michelle in Season 8.
  • Adam likes castles; both of his hiding locations in Season 9 (Hospental and Steffisburg) and his first hiding spot in Season 12 (Tobiyama) have them. This ends up being his downfall in Season 12, as Sam - recognizing the trend - spots the station name "Tobiyama Castle" and starts investigating it purely for the mention of the word 'castle'.
• 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 and Adam send a video to Sam and 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.
  • Similarly, in episode five of season seven, Ben notices that Adam just posted a reply Tweet. From this, he deduces that Adam opened Twitter for the first time in a while, and so must have just sat down and opened Twitter after boarding a train with nothing to do but wait. With the time stamp on the Tweet, he works out the exact train Adam (and Sam) just boarded and from what station. A caption appears stating "Ben is exactly right".
• Shout-Out:
  • In the first episode of season 1, Brian and Sam have to eat spicy food as part of a challenge, and Brian jokes that it's turned into an episode of Hot Ones.
  • In the second episode of season 1, Sam gives a tour of his luxurious hotel room with a caption saying "The Suite Life of Sam and Brian".
  • 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 and 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."
  • In Season 10, one of the challenges requires cutting a Tim Tam biscuit in half without using a knife. The tagline: "That's not a knife."
• 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.
• Spanner in the Works:
  • For his first run in Hide + Seek: Japan, Sam hides in Higashi-Narita station, a station built to serve Narita Airport in 1978 but eventually superseded by the terminal stations, and now only serves railfans and tourists who accidentally took the wrong line. Ben and Adam make the same mistake as the tourists, and immediately find Sam.
  • A spanner works in the opposite direction for Ben's second in the same season, as for some reason Google Maps doesn't show Sam and Adam the most optimal route, meaning that they write off Ben's actual hiding location as an area he couldn't have gotten to until they double check on Apple Maps a few hours later.
  • Ben's second run in Hide + Seek: Japan likely could have lasted even longer due to his ghillie suit and the darkness if not for the light on his microphone giving away his location.
  • Season 13 was delayed at the last minute from December 2024 to January 2025. This meant that the pre-recorded challenge for the Netherlands, creating a bouquet of flowers including a Christmas rose, became impossible because said roses were no longer in season, so no florist anywhere would have them.
  • In S13 E3, Sam and Tom have to "Kill Time, Then Tell Time": do a bunch of activities and then guess how much time has passed. One of the activities is to name 100 women, but they forget the rules and think they have to name 200. They can't check the rules on their phones, since that would require them to look at a clock.
• String Theory: In the two Hide and Seek seasons (Switzerland in Season 9 and Japan in Season 12), 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 areas of the country the hider could still be.
• 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:
  • In 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.
  • In Season 12 episode 6, Adam starts out the day confident that he's in a location that certain questions will make it difficult to find. Sam and Ben promptly ask other questions which quickly narrow down his location much more than expected.
• That Came Out Wrong:
  • In the outtakes for Season 12, Sam says that the massage chair at Narita Airport has "serious butt action", and then corrects himself.
  • Sam and Tom's attempt to play Waffle Pong in Season 13 contains a pair of them; Sam states that the ideal waffle has "deep, large holes" (As Tom notes, "you make your own jokes") and while playing, Tom notes "Oh, now you got two in the wrong hole!".
• Theseus' Ship Paradox: In Season 11, Sam needs to guess the age of an old wooden bridge in Bassano del Grappa to the correct century. His guess is the 16th century (1500s), which would have been correct for the original construction. Of course, as a wooden bridge, all the pieces would have been replaced over time by repairs, which led to some brief confusion about how to categorise its age... until it was revealed the entire bridge was blown up during World War II and completely rebuilt from scratch, meaning the bridge Sam was looking at was technically built in the 1940s and thus an automatic incorrect answer.
• 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". Tom Scott then takes this role in turn when he teams up with Sam in Season 13.
• 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!

• 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 in Season 10 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.
• Wham Line: In the Season 10 finale, Ben and Adam believe that they've locked up the win by catching a flight to Melbourne to steal it from Sam and Toby with the other team being en route to Tasmania with no way back before the game ends... but then Sam, after his and Toby's flight lands, says "Welcome to Gold Coast", revealing that he and Toby weren't actually flying to Tasmania like Ben and Adam thought but to the Gold Coast airport — which is right on the border between Queensland and New South Wales — where they can easily steal both territories from Ben and Adam to win the 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.

CHALLENGE COMPLETED!