Jet Lag Season 17: Taiwan Rail Rush | Trailer

Ok, I think this series has potential. There's a fair amount of strategy and mingle games for how many coins to put down at each stop, which they've commented on in the podcast as keeping the game feeling fresher than the other formats.

Oh, and I instinctively called them coins didn't I. I know they're chips, and the team called them chips to differentiate then from how coins work in other seasons. Still, even in this episode, they have to fight calling then coins. I think coins would have been ok, they've used it as a generic term before.

I think Adam and Ben made the right decision to not combat Sam and Michael on the bird challenge, and instead be a bit more aggressive on the board to get some stations down. Plus they got to choose the busier side of the island where there are more stations and more trains to connect to.

On the podcast Michael talks about his strategy for the bird challenge, which was to try and memorise everything. In hindsight, he realises that Sam is almost definitely going to choose a distinctive bird and therefore he doesn't need to memorise every type of dove or pigeon. It works out in the end, because Sam chooses a distinctive bird. Also not shown on the show is the fact they had to find the sign in the park. It's not at all obvious where the sign is, so the first step was to walk around and find it in the first place. They decided to cut all that from the episode to keep the pace up.

Adam at the tofu rocks going in with a plan to remember a sequence of numbers abstracted away from the path he would be taking was certainly a choice. I also think his chances went down drastically when he realised it was a hex grid rather than square, as that seemed to shake him really bad. For those sorts of challenges I think the answer is just to try and memorise the shape of the path relative to a certain direction and follow that shape as best as you can.

The cat village was very vibey, though I don't think I'd want to live there. I think the novelty of having all the cats around would wear off quickly. Michael was right in that the photo of cats touching would be the hardest to get. My watching buddy was talking about how "cat puddles" are a thing, but that's only for cats that are more familiar with each other and are in a safe place, and I feel that's less likely in a village full of strays.

Back to Adam and Ben, as soon as I saw the Buddha and pagodas was a Monty Hall problem I paused and told my buddy "mathematically they should switch, but I am sure Amy would have chosen the Buddha to fake them out". We then had a tangent where I had to explain the Monty Hall problem to them (which took a while), but I felt vindicated at the end when it turns out that Amy did indeed put the metaphorical car in the Buddha tower.

The quiz questions for the hot tub hot seat were tough, I'm not surprised Sam didn't get them. Apparently there were more geography and food questions that Sam would have answered, but of course Michael doesn't know Sam having only played this game for less than a day at this point. Also they didn't really factor in how long it would take to just ask the questions, so they were both glad they attempted a conservative number of questions even if they didn't get it.

I'm definitely looking forward to how this one plays out. As I said at the top, it has potential for sure, and the loop-like nature of Taiwan's rail network makes this game work really well here.

My feeling about this season keeps growing.

I think it was definitely the right decision of Sam and Michael to go back to the west coast of the island. With there being more stations there, I feel like it's more likely that new challenges will appear in the area, as well as there being more ways to get there between the high speed and local lines. It definitely pays off, especially when do many challenges end up being in the top half of the map where they already are, which then effectively forces Adam and Ben to go down even further.

That tofu rocks challenge strikes again. I this Sam and Michael did the right things by practicing beforehand to give them the best chance. They also realised that trying to translate the path to a sequence and memorising the sequence was more effort and it'd be faster to remember the path. Still, it bested them. Apparently when Amy designed the path she might not have known that the memorisation time was only 2 minutes, due to the way that challenges were designed this season.

The McDonald's taste test was meant to be a shrimp tempura burger, but the particular place they went weren't selling it. Amy had actually put together an entire list of fallback options, and the one they had was like 3rd on the list.

Apparently they've had the challenge where you have to film for some amount of time where nobody enters the frame in a lot of seasons, it's just never come up. As soon as I saw Adam take his shoes off I physically cringed. I've lived near a fairly silty river, and I just do not enjoy the squelchy mud, and after that he would have had to put his socks and shoes back on without cleaning them and that just is not fun. Apart from that, I think they did pretty well here. They identified an area where nobody would go, then angled the shot to ensure the best chances, and went for it. Not much to say about it really.

The following is a direct quote from the podcast:

So then Mike and I go and acquire some juicy balls. Juicy balls to suck and blow on, [...]

(I refuse to grow up)

They say it on the podcast, but it's cool that there is just a place that made boba tea a thing, and it has stayed in a small building, and while it has definitely been upgraded over the years, it's still just a shop on the street and not some big giant commercial enterprise. As for the execution of the challenge, once they figured out to shoot them high their success rate went massively up. There would have been some editing, since Michael said their success rate was about 50% by the end, but that was still way better than shooting straight for the cup. If they knew about the technique before calling the shots, then I'm sure they would have gone much higher.

The monkey mountain cliffhanger was such a good place to end the episode. I haven't watched episode 3 yet, but I feel it could go either way. In the research they did before making their guess, they saw videos with lots of monkeys, but in the video itself I'm not hearing all that much noise, and there's only so much distance you can cover walking and looking out for monkeys in 40 minutes.

There was some extra chat on the podcast about their overnighting, Sam and Michael stayed at this nautical themed place, and I was thinking their story was actually going to go somewhere or explain why there's a nautical themed hotel in a random office building, but instead it ended on some social embarassment as they are asked why they're choosing to stay there. This paragraph I'm writing also seemed like it was going somewhere.

Monkey mountain delivers! The team on the podcast all agree that 40 monkeys was about bang on the correct number for this challenge, in that it was both high but also achievable. Sam and Michael had quite the shock learning that the boys earned 80 coins from that, especially after going low with the boba challenge.

The zoo challenge entirely depended on whether there were grazing animals in there. Luckily there were, and it's quite funny that they immediately walk in and find a llama. They do comment on how challenges sometimes deviate from their expected value (sometimes a low value challenge is hard, or a high value challenge is easy), and that's just part of the game. There is also some chatter about the spreadsheet they were using to track everything, and how they blacked out the rows until that challenge was unlocked, and used colour coding to note the state of it. It's a lot of manual admin to be doing mid-game.

I have to say, I enjoyed some of the edits in this part of the episode. Sam and Michael drop their bags off and comment on how freeing it is, then we cut to Adam and Ben having to lug their packs up the mountain. Adam and Ben talk about how they need to find monkeys, then it jumps to Sam and Michael outside the zoo looking at the monkey enclosure. Later we see both teams wanting to get on the train they need, one team get on and the other doesn't.

On the podcast they mention how these two challenges were almost simultaneous, and there were tough editing decisions to make those cuts work. The boys completed monkey mountain only about 10-15 minutes before Sam and Michael attempted the zoo challenge, which is so close when you think about the fact they are doing two animal challenges on opposite ends of the country. I'm glad they did shift things around a little, as watching the entirety of monkey mountain in one go without the cuts to the other team would have been really long.

Sam and Michael not making it onto their train actually helps them here, because they end up with the ability to go for a different steal. Trying to count jellyfish in curved tanks in a low-light mirrored room is the kind of thing you'd see in actual reality tv. I think they both did a very good job at following through on the challenge. I've quite enjoyed these challenges where the two team members have to be in sync with each other, and it seems they do too so I wouldn't be surprised if more of these featured in future team games.

I'm really enjoying how this season is going. This is a good format for the location they've chosen, and I think there are things they can definitely take into future games.

Quote of the episode:

Ben: Well, I'm holding a banana.
Adam: wheeze
Ben: ...and it tastes like a banana.

Looking back at this episode, so little and so much happened here. This feels like a turning point almost, where everything the teams have done before led to this point.

Of course, the big thing that happens in this episode is that Sam and Michael have a path to steal the steal, and do it. The challenge itself seems to be one that wasn't quite calibrated correctly, but i mentioned in last week's comment that that's just a natural part of this game. It seems very much like they looked at a map, took the most straightforward route to town, and the place they were looking for was on the corner of the main street.

The big knock-on effect is that Adam and Ben have do throw down so many chips on their stations so that the steal didn't give Sam and Michael an even bigger chip lead. They might've won 70 chips with the taste test challenge, but they had throw them all down in an area that Sam and Michael were never going to contest. Now they're basically in a position where the have to go big on the can stacking challenge in order to try and break through the barrier to where the challenges are.

I'm very interested to see how the next episode plays out, because a lot of this game now depends on whether Adam can walk 200ft with a stack of cans. If he succeeds, then there's the possibility of breaking through into the Taipei area where both teams are rushing to claim challenges. If he fails, then it'll be difficult to dethrone Sam and Michael. I'll always root for the boys, but I definitely want them to succeed even more here.