Jet Lag: The Game: Hide and Seek: Providence Edition (A Review)

Hear ye, passing traveller, of a tale of whimsy and woe.

This Sunday just gone, I played a game of “Jet Lag: The Game Hide and Seek Transit” with friends. For those who don’t know, Jet Lag is a web series where teams compete in different formats (often children’s games, like races, hide-and-seek, connect four, or tag) on large playing fields, spanning countries or continents. The minute-to-minute gameplay usually consists of

1. working out what public transport to take,
2. taking public transport, and
3. completing challenges.

It’s a fun show! One of the hosts, Ben Doyle, is a Brown alum, and we had the privilege to have him cameo in Brown Puzzlehunt 2025. Anyway, they recently published a card game, which generalizes their Hide and Seek format for “nearly anywhere in the world”. This was our experience of playing the game in the Providence area.

The Rules

Here’s a quick overview of the rules as we played them. There are two teams of people, who take turns being the “hiders” and the “seekers”. When you are the hiders, you have a set interval of time to hide somewhere on the game map. You must hide somewhere within a quarter-mile of a ‘station’ (trains, buses, whatever), and stay within ten feet of a marked path. The station you choose at the end of your hiding period is your station for the rest of that round; the quarter-mile circle around that station is considered your ‘zone’. For most of the round, the hiders are free to move around within their zone.

When the hiding period is up, the seekers try to find the hiders. They can help narrow down the playing field by asking several kinds of questions: the hiders must answer truthfully given their current position.¹Note that some questions may have different answers depending on where, exactly, they are within the zone. Once the seekers have entered the hiders’ zone (i.e. they are within a quarter-mile of their station, and they are not on public transit), the round enters the “endgame” phase. When in endgame, the hiders are frozen to their current location, and cannot move. The game continues until the seekers are within five feet of the hiders and can see them.

Why don’t the seekers just ask as many questions as possible? That’s where the deck comes in. The hiders are in possession of a deck of cards, and with every question, they get to draw from it and add to their hand. Cards include time bonuses (i.e. they add some time to your end total), curses (tasks or restrictions for the seekers), vetoes (refuse to answer a question), and other various kinds of cards.

Whichever hiding team stays hidden for the longest wins. Simple as.

This is almost identical to how this is played on the show, with some adaptations for flexibility. These rules seem pretty decent – the official rulebook contains clarifications about what things are and aren’t allowed, and in general the whole thing seems airtight and flexible for whatever location you want to play it in.

In reality there is an edge case so dangerous that it fundamentally breaks the game, and we discovered this the hard way. Without some decent house rules it is possible to make the game unwinnable for one of the teams, and unfun for both. Beware.

Our Game Boundary

(The rest of this post will use imperial measurements, because that’s the version of the game we played with.)

We played in the greater Providence area, which was strictly defined beforehand through consensual agreement. In practical terms it is this map:

Everywhere on this map is in-bounds, and every bus line on the map is considered in-play. We did not set a minimum service requirement for a bus line to be considered legitimate. Bus services in RI can be pretty spotty, so some are sub-hourly, especially on weekends. Hold onto that thought.

Hiders get 45 minutes to hide (which is slightly longer than the suggested amount of time for this game size).

For the purposes of asking questions, locations outside of the game boundary are not considered.

The scale bar on this map is also wrong. Hold onto that thought too.

Round 1: We Sought

On Sunday we convened at the agreed-upon starting location, at a bench along the Woonasquatucket River. This is only a 3-minute walk from Kennedy Plaza, Providence’s central transportation hub, but a change in elevation prevents the hiders from observing the seekers’ movements. My team consisted of myself (naturally), Alex, and Julia; on the opposing team was Luke, Stephen, and Jackie. The dice had determined that our team would be seeking first.

It was a bright cold day in November, and the clocks were striking nine. The hiders took off; we settled in to do some thinking.

The Waiting Period

We decided on two main approaches to help narrow the field. The first was to spend the 45 minutes determining which lines had buses coming through Kennedy Plaza during the hiding period. We

At some point during this process, I said speculatively:

Knowing the other team, they hopped on the first bus they saw, and rode it to the very last stop on the line.

Psychologically, you want to be moving as far away from the hiders as possible; waiting at the plaza for a desired bus seems intuitively counterproductive. Introducing distance is an obvious way of prolonging your hiding period, even if doing so narrows the number of possible locations you might be.

Bifurcation

Southern Parallels

Closing the Net

Endgame

Resetting the Game

Round 2: We Hought¹(pronounced “hid”)

The Hiding Period

Bifurcation

Endgame???