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We played Jetlag Hide&Seek and it went well
After talking about it a few months ago my copy of the game finally arrived. @MimicSquid and I met up in San Francisco today and finally got to play Hide&Seek. It was a good time and it was neat to have a better sense of how the game plays instead of just watching it on Nebula. We're planning on playing again in the not too distant future, so if anyone would like to join in on the next one, please let one of us know (we both thought that it would play better with at least three players).
Since they stocked the game in Europe, I went for it too and placed my order. It really helped that they made the last mini series in NYC to show how it can be played in a single city.
When it arrives, I will try to find some people to play with (I already have suggestions) and we will tackle on Pilsen in Czech Republic. It is just around say 170 thousand city with a few tram lines and around 10/20 trolley/bus lines. If the game goes well, we may scale up and go for Prague some day.
I suppose it is good to do some training around a table to find how mechanics work in your specific gameplay area and to try and find some good spots to hide and how to get there (fast). And also to figure out tracking and distances to and from objects/hiders/seekers.
We definitely found that the endgame was the least interesting part. We're thinking about changing the rules for hiding places to make fewer options for tricky hiding spots. 10 trolley lines should be plenty. Our map had 8 train lines of various modes and it seemed reasonable. I would have preferred more ring routes than we have (San Francisco's transit is quite radial), but it worked well.
We will have to think that through as well. Maybe even just tram lines could be enough, it takes around 30 minutes to go end-to-end on each one and they share part of their paths in various parts of the city. but theydon't cover the whole city, there will be big parts left unused. Trollybuses are a bit more star-shaped, which could be more challenging. They also have much more coverage of the city.
We will likely forfeit buses. At least for hiding locations, but maybe not for travel.
In half an hour, I could traverse the whole city given the right connections or half of it if I jump in between a few lines.
Did you do theory training? Like sit down somewere and do a dry run of the game? Or some preparations like looking up timetables for various transport options? Or just looking up different places or part of the city?
We didn't do any shared strategizing. There was some discussion about what counts as valid lines of transit (SF has a metro line (8 stops with 5 min frequency), 6 tram lines (20-30 stops with 10-15 min frequency), 1 true street car line (30 stops with 15 min frequency), 4 cable car lines (30+ stops with 15-20 min frequency), and a bunch of bus lines with a bunch of stops). We ended up discounting buses because they made things too complicated and the cable cars because they are much more expensive and don't allow for free transfers which means that hopping on and off gets pricey quickly.
I had a vague idea of where the different tram lines went and what those areas of the city are like before starting and that was good enough to make it work. Certainly you could be super competitive about it and figure out the timings for how long it takes each train to go between each stop to be able to precisely know how far you can go in a set amount of time. But figuring that out doesn't sound like fun to me, and it's supposed to be fun. My goal for playing was to spend some time seeing the city and having a new lens to see it through. It did that for me.
Ultimately, my thought (and I think that Mimicsquid would agree) was that the small sized game rules only allow 30 minutes to hide. If you have to transfer lines, that can easily eat up 5 or 10 minutes. Spending a third of your hiding time stationary is a huge disadvantage. It makes more sense to me to prioritize getting on an early train than it does to spend time waiting for a transfer and not being able to get very far.
I hid first and when Mimic left to hide, they ended up having to wait nearly 10 minutes for their train to leave the station due to poor timing. This ended up narrowing their possible hiding spaces dramatically.
We won't be using trains, as there are jsut a few stops across the city and trains are not that frequent.
Tams on the other hand are completely opposite, they stop every few hundred meters and on week days they are very frequent (down to every five minutes), but on weekend there is 10 minute frequency. There are only three lines though, but there are like 20 stops on each line (some of them shared with other lines).
Trolleybuses have 10 lines with 20-30 stops in between, some stops are also shared for multiple lines and they go in 8-10 minute frequency.
My point in pre-strategizing is more like "I want to hide there. Which lines do I need to take and is it even possible?" I know Jet Lag team does that before they go on with their game and I believe it is good to do beforehand. Not that much, but just to get your bearings around the play area - like if you go to paintball arena and do a walkaround before you play.
We will have to talk with other participants to pick the right game length, but due to small city I believe "short" will be our pick. Maybe we will allow for a bit longer hiding period (say 40 instead of 30 minutes) to account for poorer connections, so that we don't run into Mimicsquid's problem.
I think in the case of NYC, they probably didn't prep as much in advance (as it was a last-minute change) but had familiarity from living there
I know, they spoke about it on the podcast. But they did some dry runs on Japan at least qnd I think it is good to know your surroundings just a bit. If I went into Japan, I wouldn't know prefectures or Shinkansen lines etc. I would have to research it on the go. And I think you should know such info before you start playing.
oh yeah for sure I think the prep is necessary when doing it in a foreign country like that, especially when it's a large game like that.
Playing somewhere completely unfamiliar would be rough. I'd be worried about the chance of ending up somewhere I didn't want to be by accident, just because I didn't know where I was going.
I was using "train" as a catchall word for vehicles that run on tracks. (The US's transit options are so poor that this isn't usually ambiguous, San Francisco does have some commuter rail, but it wasn't even worth considering for our game)
If you think a longer hiding period would be more fun, I'd say go for it. The rules are super general so that you can play it in a lot of places, but they're also not idea for anywhere because of that. If you think it would be better to have a 40 min hiding period, I say go for it
I've been slowly planning for a Chicago game with some friends and family, but I'm worried that the CTA's hub-and-spoke design will cause some frustration. We might have to do something like "CTA bus routes are in-play, but hiding zones are still only centered on El stops", or somesuch.
Yeah, we explicitly excluded all but the rail stops as hiding places just to keep the number of potential places down. It's much better than every bus stop being an option.
Mimic and I were talking about our next round and we're thinking about changing the way that the interstitial period is handled. Instead of using the old hiding spot as the new start spot, we're thinking that we might have everyone start from the middle of the hub every time. This means that there's much less benefit to going first, and you can't have the first hider go 30 min down a spoke and then the only option for the second hider be to go back to the hub.
In Chicago, you might be able to make it work with just getting back to the loop and consider all loop stations equal? That still gives you some hints as to where they might be headed, but levels the playing field in a big way. Another option would be to increase the hiding time for subsequent hiders (first person gets 30 min to hide, subsequent people get 45 min).
Yeah I think this aspect of the rules is very dependent on the transport available in your area and on how out-of-the-way the first hiders end up getting! I think these kinds of tweaks to a specific setting make sense.
Is it this one?: https://store.nebula.tv/products/hideandseek
I had no idea they made a physical game. I think I definitely want to get it.
That's the one.
I'd say that you should give it a try
Awesome! I've been really considering picking up the game for myself as well, since I live right next to Portland OR, Vancouver WA, and just a short trip away from Seattle WA, so there's lots of great places to try playing the game! Glad to hear it's fun even outside of the viewing experience.
Definitely. I've never had three hours go by so fast. As the seeker, you really are continuously juggling the mental work of narrowing down the possibility space, hustling through public transit to make your connections, and trying to balance your phone, notebook, backpack, maps, pens... Bonooru's theory is that the seekers work as a team not so much because you really need a second person for that part, but that you absolutely could not do all of that and film it at the same time. I agree wholeheartedly. It did not feel like I had a spare moment to breathe when I was the seeker.
I expect that's why they usually do the longer games. There's much more waiting and travel time involved if your play area is the whole of Japan, vs. just NYC.
I definitely would have appreciated having longer times on trains to do some thinking. I know that when I got cursed to make going through doorways different, I had to take a minute to stop and think and that was a big help
Awesome! Sounds super intense, but like a blast!
It was great. Hiding was quite chill, but seeking was trying to keep track of a bunch of things all at once. If you've watched the show, I've never wanted an updating map more. That would have made seeking so much easier. Trying to keep track of the different radiuses where I knew that Mimicsquid was and wasn't and where they overlapped with valid hiding locations was a lot. But it was super cool once I got the hang of it.
Where did you each hide?
Starting from the Ferry Building, Chinatown and SoMa, respectively. There are rules for short, medium and long play, and we were using the short variation that gave only a half hour to hide. It meant that the game lasted about 6 hours, but it really restricted how far we could go and left us much more at the whims of the train timing. San Francisco is just too big for the short version, though we're also talking about starting at a hub rather than the edge of the city to expand the possibilities.
I also think medium would be better. If you wanted Oakland in play then the ferry building makes sense. Otherwise maybe start at Civic Center.
Either Civic Center of Van Ness would probably work better depending on if we want to make Bart easier or harder to get to
A friend of mine has ordered the thing, and I'm really excited to try it, but I'm actually wondering about one thing: What were you using to share/track location? Also, how long did it take you? We're planning on playing in Zürich, which is obviously quite a bit smaller, but the game seems to be able to go really long from what I've seen so far
I wondered the same. I think sharing of seekers position via ie. Google maps would be viable? This is what I would be trying out.
The thing is how to measure distance from seekers to ie. hospital or airport. I can get my distance, that would be easy enough using Google maps on my phone if I was the hider, but how to know theirs? I'm thinking they send which hospital/airport is nearest to them and how far it is and hider just compares and sends yes/no answer?
It wul be also good to make a list of such olaces beforehand so there are no doubts when you actually play, I suppose.
The way it works is that the hider can see the seekers' location at all times, but the seeker will send a pin with their specific location for a question, at which point the hider can use Google Maps to track the distance from that pin and give their response. The tentacles questions use categories of locations that have special recognition within Google Maps, and the rulebook has details regarding what counts as valid.
Thanks for the insights! I can't wait to have mine and run through the rules and play it!
We used Google Maps' location sharing. It was easy to set up, and can be set to only share for a certain number of hours.
With just the two of us, on the shortest version, it took roughly 6 hours. We powered through, but my advice would be to have more frequent breaks. At the end of each seeking, stop, have a meal, chat about it. Plan for it to be played over multiple days. I'm writing this the day after, and I'm pretty wiped out. Depending on how easy it is to meet up, doing only a single round in any given day might make more sense.
Theoretically it can last an unlimited amount of time. But, I don't think it's likely to really do that. Our two hiding periods were ~3 hours and ~1.5 hours. If you're worried about it running too long, having a cap on a hiding period so that if you don't get found in X amount of time you tell the seekers where you are and you meet up. Mimicsquid and I talked about having an option to give up the search before we started because we were worried about this case. We never went into too much detail, but our idea was something like "you can give up the search, but if you do the hider gets some time bonus based off of how close you were when you gave up".
I'd maybe be interested in joining y'all next time as I'm also in San Francisco now. I'm not too familiar with the game though, will need to learn how to play in the mean time.
It's pretty easy to pick up. We were thinking about having a partner for the hider, so if you hid first, that would make sure that you would have an opportunity to get a handle on the rules before going solo. I'll DM you about logistics for a game in the not too distant future
I would also be interested in joining, if you want extra people. I am moving back to the Bay Area this July.
I DM'ed you with some logistics.
I'd also be in!
DMing you about logistics
Sounds good, I'll look for your DM then, thanks!