History WebVideo / JetLagTheGame

* TheAllegedCar: For the "make a go-kart" challenge in season two, Ben & Adam make a comically rickety contraption -- basically just a board with wheels and a bucket attached. It falls apart the first time Ben tries riding on it. For added fun, this all [[VideoGame/MarioKart takes place in Italy.]]
* AntiClimax: Season 2. [[spoiler:Sam & Joseph's plan hinges on completing a bungee jump challenge in Singapore to get them onward travel to South Korea. This fails when Ben & Adam complete both that challenge and the "Eat at a Michelin-starred restaurant" challenge before Sam & Joseph. While Ben & Adam safely secure their onward travel to Australia, Sam & Joseph are essentially stranded in Singapore with too expensive flights, too many unsuitable challenges, and not enough time to reach the finish line. The end of the video doesn't even cut to them after their plan of gambling their way to enough money for a flight to the US fizzles out.]]

** Both teams attempt to run a drunk mile, but [[spoiler: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 [[spoiler:Sam & Michelle]] complete challenges, including one that lets a team steal a ticket from their opponents' hand.
** [[spoiler:Sam & Michelle]] steal a ticket that lets them fly to a neighboring state, planning to fly to Denver... but then the flight is sold out, and there are no other flights that arrive before the rest period, so they are forced to rent a car and drive to Colorado instead.

* CoversAlwaysLie: The thumbnail for ''Arctic Escape'' E3 shows Ben & Adam with a departure board that says "C27 / FLIGHT 1607 / TICKET SALES CLOSED". [[https://www.flightaware.com/live/flight/DAL741/history/20231024/2235Z/PANC/KSEA Their actual flight]] was numbered 741 and left from Gate B8.

* DarkestHour: [[spoiler:Happens to Sam & Michelle at the end of ''Arctic Escape'' E5. Ben & Adam are in Chicago, with an 800-mile train (from Chicago to Pittsburgh), a 450-mile flight (from Pittsburgh to Charlotte, North Carolina), and a 1,000-mile flight west (from Charlotte to Key West). Sam & Michelle's only hope of winning is to steal a ticket from Ben & Adam; there are two steals in the day's deck, one of which requires a team to stand in a spot where Music/ElvisPresley stood, so Sam & Michelle position themselves near a park that was the site of a stadium that Elvis played at. Sure enough, that ticket comes up, and Sam & Michelle head to the park... which is fenced off.]]

* DoNotRunWithAGun: AvertedTrope: Sam & Toby sneak up to the route that Ben & Adam are taking on bikes to intercept them. Once the biking team comes within range, Sam charges full-tilt at Adam and shoots him with his nerf gun while sprinting.

* GoneHorriblyRight: At the end of Day 2 of ''Crime Spree'', Sam & JT decide to stay at the Boston Airport Hotel, but then realize that it would be too obvious, so they exploit a rule that allows them to turn off their tracker 30 minutes before arriving at any hotels they stay at. They drive away from the Boston Airport Hotel, turn off the tracker, and then do a U-turn, all to make it look like they are going somewhere else. Adam & Ben are fooled by this, and they realize that they have no way of finding Sam & JT at this point, so they decide to turn in for the night... at the Boston Airport Hotel.

-->'''Narrator:''' Ben & Adam are Sam's writers. In fact, they wrote the words I'm reading right now. On a completely unrelated note, I personally think that they're both very hot.

** In ''Connect Four'', [[spoiler:the flight from Salt Lake City to Butte, Montana gets turned back to Salt Lake City. This allows Ben & Adam to claim Utah, ensuring that if they claim Montana, then they win. Ultimately subverted when Sam & Brian claim Montana first.]]

*** Sam & Toby's original plan is to skip Queenstown, but they are two coins short of being able to. Luckily, Queenstown took a lot less time to complete than they expected, allowing them to skip Invercargill instead and win the game.

** ''Arctic Escape'': [[spoiler:Sam & Michelle steal Ben & Adam's ticket that lets a team fly to a neighboring state. They initially plan to fly from Salt Lake City to Denver, but then that flight is sold out. They then plan to fly from Dallas to New Orleans, but then their previous flight is delayed, and they can't make it. They finally use it to fly from Atlanta to Key West and win the game.]]

* SherlockScan: In the second episode of season 1, after Ben & Adam send a video to Sam & Brian claiming Arizona, Sam manages to notice the ''exact'' gate that they're at and then checks what flights are leaving from that gate around the time they sent the video to deduce their plan and form a counter-strategy.

** Inverted slightly in both Seasons 5 & 7, as [[spoiler: 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''.

* DarthWiki/WhatAnIdiot: InUniverse. In ''The Layover'' in the S8–S9 off-season, Adam did a poll of 1,200 ''Jet Lag'' fans, with one question being "What is the dumbest thing anyone has ever done on ''Jet Lag''?" The answers were: 1. Adam taking off his wig in ''Tag EUR It''[[note]]as it meant his elaborate disguise was completely wasted when Sam and Ben staked out the train station he was at[[/note]]; 2. Sam & Joseph gambling in Singapore in ''Circumnavigation''[[note]]a high-risk strategy that left them completely stranded halfway through the game[[/note]]; 3. Sam & Brian buying a tracker powerup in ''Battle 4 America''[[note]]as it wouldn't have given them any way to actually stop Ben and Adam's plan and they ended not not having the coin to steal back the critical challenge[[/note]]; 4. trusting Deutsche Bahn[[note]]which has led directly to at least one tag in each season[[/note]].

* 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.

*** These seasons, as well as season 4, also used exact dollar amounts for purchasing travel and accommodation, with season 1 having a fixed amount and season 2 allowing them to earn more, incetivising finding cheaper but less convenient means of travel and needing to keep hotels in mind. This appears to phasing out and replaced with the more abstract coins in later seasons, with accommodation not factoring into the budget and expenditure based on travel time or distance instead of the exact cost of travel, to incentivise more pure strategy.[[note]] It's possible that Sam and Joseph losing season 2 by missing a cheap flight and instead failing to get a more expensive flight was considered anti-climatic[[/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 systen.

*** This also makes ''Jet Lag'' a bit of an ArtifactTitle, as three seasons (3, 5 and 6) have now been filmed entirely in one time zone each.

* Season 10 (TBD): "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 10 (TBD): "Au$tralia". 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 10 (TBD): Game details unknown. Will take place in Australia with Toby returning as a guest.

* SurprisinglyRealisticOutcome: Being a travel show done by a ragtag group of guerilla documentations there are a lot of situations a higher budget show wouldn't encounter:
** In the first ''Tag Across Europe'' season Adam runs into considerable trouble when his bank dings his activity as fraud and locks his card. Since he is under a curse preventing him from using his phone and he'd forgotten about the exception for important matters such as this, the setback causes him great difficulty when he has to do... anything.
** ''Capture the Flag'' features a curse that forces you to catch a late train in Japan. Anyone familiar with Japan's rail system knows that nothing short of a mechanical failure or serious threat to safety can cause that, [[spoiler: and as a result it becomes quite a horrific run-ender for Ben and Adam]].

* FreezeFrameBonus: In Season 9's finale, [[spoiler: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.]]

** Spending coins on dice to roll for curses in ''Hide + Seek'' seems like it'd add intrigue and risk, especially since it's the deterrent to the Seekers asking too many questions, but in the final game the randomness far outweighs the dramatic benefit. It doesn't help that the very low valued curses are practically useless, and since it's always possible to roll 1's on every die it becomes incredibly hard to actually get one that will help. Comes to a head in the finale, where [[spoiler:Adam]] manages to win the entire game without spending a single coin on curses.

* FreezeFrameBonus: In Season 9's finale, [[spoiler:Sam and Ben get off a train at Bergdorf in order to try and locate Adam. If you look at the LED display of the train they just got off, you can see that it's bound for Thun, which is where Adam got off the train and made for Steffisburg on foot.]]

* RunningGagged: 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.

** [[spoiler: Ben and Adam spend most of episode 6 of season 6 just trying to get enough distance to reach their far Flag. After an incredible sequence towards the end where a careful use of evasion and tower placement allow them to escape Sam and Scotty and assure certain victory, they decide to pull a challenge to make up the last coins they need for their plan to work. They immediately pull a curse that allows them to travel only on a late train (a serious problem on Japan's famously precise railways), and the only train they could take to win leaves on time. They're so dejected from the experience that they place a tower just to spite Scotty and then wallow in their defeat.]]

** [[spoiler: 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.]]

--> '''Ben:''' Well, we could call in a bomb threat?

** In the first ''Tag Across Europe'' season Adam runs into considerable trouble when his bank dings his activity as fraud and locks his card. This causes him great difficulty when he has to do... anything.

** 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, [[spoiler:a massive flock of birds takes flight, shooting their count into the hundreds.]] Justified, of course, since this is an unscripted reality show.

** Episode 6 of Season 7 has the season basically conclude with one. [[spoiler:Ben realizes that he can change to an infrequent train in order to get Adam stranded away from his territory if the chasers catch up, but only discovers this as his train is pulling into the station he needs to change at, completely forgetting that he doesn't have enough coins to take the new train. He draws a challenge, and it's basically one of the best he could get: a curse that instantly gives him 1500 free coins but triples his challenge veto period for the remainder of his run. Those coins are enough to get him to his new destination so far out of the way that he's won by the time Sam and Adam actually catch up to him.]]

** One gambit was present in Season 9 Episode 6. [[spoiler: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.]]

* AwesomeButImpractical: In the European tag game, the rules technically allowed for a player to board an airplane, which would likely make them impossible to catch. However, affording it would have required so many challenges that the player would almost certainly be caught.

** In Season 9, [[spoiler: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 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 9, episode 3, Ben hides in a playground that can't be seen from the main streets and the side path to it is very easy to overlook, which leads to Sam and Ben repeatedly walking right past his hiding location for over an hour of searching.

** In Season 9, [[spoiler: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 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 - 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.]]

** In Season 9, [[spoiler:much attention is drawn during Sam's run to the hiders 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 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 - 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.]]