Differences From the Official Rules
Jet Lag: The Game - Hide + Seek comes with a set of cards, some rule books, and an investigation book. The official expansion introduced some new rules associated with the new cards. You can purchase them both in the Nebula Store.
This document has been rewritten quite extensively from the original rules, sometimes in order to standardise criteria across different sections, sometimes to place concepts closer to each other, sometimes to clarify the meaning of a rule, and sometimes to introduce new rules.
Some of these rule changes have been inspired by, or blatantly stolen from, the unofficial Jet Lag: Benelux Discord Server’s rewrite of the rules, and we have asked for feedback from a number of Jet Lag chats and forums, as well as our friends. We know these rules are not consistent with other groups’ rules, but we hope this too can serve as inspiration for others.
We use a custom deck of cards, in which some of the official cards have been changed to be more in line with our preferences and philosophy, as well as adding our own cards. We respect that Wendover Productions have put a lot of thought and work into creatign this game, and don’t want to encourage pirate versions of the game. As such, in the public version of this document we have left out the text and rules of specific cards if they have not changed from the official cards, and we encourage you to buy the official games from the Nebula Store to play with. That being said, the source code to our rule book is publicly available, and if you have a copy of the original cards and rules, it is possible, if labourious, to create the files necessary to have a complete version of this ruelbook.
We consider this to be the only rule book for the games we play, and we have retired the official rulebooks and Investigation Book from use.
This section is a non-exhaustive set of highlights of the major changes. It should not be considered normative.
The Prime Directive
First and foremost, we have explicitly stated The Prime Directive as a core philosophy of our games: Don’t Be A Dick. We have done this because we are not trying to play this game for content, but to be among friends.
Hiding
We tend to play Large games, and we found that the way the Wendover Crew play it for TV is not really compatible with the way we wish to play it. As such we have introduced a rule of one game day per player with a maximum game time of 9 hours. We’ve never really come close to that time, but it makes the footing equal for all players. You can see more about this in the chapter on Hiding.
We’ve also added a section on Time and Location Shifting in order to put some definition on how we move around at the beginning of the day. The Wendover crew have admitted on the Layover that they do something similar to our Location Shifting in their games. One rule that has made our life easier is to have the hider start in the hour before the seekers depart, so that the hider doesn’t have to get up ridiculously early, or the seekers spend hours waiting around for the game to start. One upshot of this is that hotels are much more predictable, and it is the hider’s job to book a hotel for all the players to use at the end of their round.
In terms of hiding spots, we’ve mostly clarified rules as a result of interesting stunts that the players have played. We’ve changed the “3 metres from a marked path” rule into a much more interesting “should be visible from a marked path” rule. We’ve had a lot of discussion about hiding inside buildings, especially on wet weather days. We’ve also covered some of the more esoteric ideas, such as hiding whilst swimming in a lake. This is mostly covered in the section on Hiding Spots
Seeking
We’ve added the concept of Lunch Time, something that whilst it wasn’t originally intended that way, has been successfully weaponised in games to avoid being cursed whilst on transport.
We’ve also been more explicit about Unscheduled Breaks, as we have needed to take some before, due to the high stress that this game can produce.
Questions
We use our own installation of the taibeled Jet Lag Hide and Seek Map Generator as a way of performing the mapping for the games we play, and we feel the game is a lot better for it. We didn’t sign up to do exercises in cartography as part of the game. As such, we’ve basically elided the extensive instructions in the original rule book about how to calculate Matching, Measuring and Tentacle questions, as we just assume that what the app says, goes.
We have added a few questions of our own, though:
We have also found that some photo questions were incredibly overpowered, and so we have changed them to be more expensive: Draw 3, Pick 1 during the long game and Draw 3, Pick 2 in the end game. For more information on which questions are affected, see the section on Photo Questions
Whilst the concept of taking photos ahead of time is already covered in the original rules, we’ve added a more extensive section on Caching of Photos
We also decided to define the mechanics of how Thermometer questions work, particularly with reference to when the question is asked, and how it interacts with cards that block questions, or the randomize card. You can see more about that in Thermometer Mechanics.
A lot of questions, and some of the cards in the deck, have required us to clarify the definition of certain things, such as buildings, bodies of water, and so on. We’ve added these definitions to each section as needed, but they’ve all been gathered together in the Definition of Terms page.
Cards
We’ve included all the cards the game has in this rule book. As explained above, we’ve left the text of the official cards out of the public version of this rule book, but any modified texts or rules are included.
We’ve defined a mechanism for drawing and picking cards, as it became increasingly obvious that the Wendover crew had made some implicit assumptions, but left the official rules ambiguous. We’ve documented it over at [Card Mechanics.]
We’ve created a couple of power ups: Double or Nothing, which basically recreates the Veto rules as explained in the original rule book and then ammended in the expansion, and the Veto Question or 15 Minute Time Bonus power up that basically does what it says in the title.
We’ve created an easter egg time bonus: the 4’33“ Time Bonus as nod to John Cage’s seminal classical music masterpiece.
We’ve defined two new concepts that apply to curses: Timeouts, that mean that curses are never interminable, and Immediate Vetoes, which allow the seekers to clear a curse immediately and continue the game for a steep price.
With curses, a lot of the modifications we’ve made are basically adjusting times or distances, such as for example in Curse of the Mediocre Travel Agent, where we halved the distances travelled and doubled the waiting time.
We have sometimes rewritten curses to be clearer, such as Curse of the Right Turn, which on first reading felt like it didn’t allow the seekers to continue straight on at an intersection.
And, of course, we have created our own curses, and even a blessing! A full list of them is in the Game Setup section
Country-Specific Rules
So far, we have played the game in two countries: 🇩🇪 Germany and 🇳🇱 The Netherlands. We have tailored a number of rules to each area, including setting which Administrative Zones we can use on the mapping app, which forms of Transit are available to use, and in the case of Germany, a rule that requires us to start each day in a station that has good ICE connections. See the section on Hiding., and the Definition of OSM Zones for more information.
Contributing to these rules
If something is still left unclear in these rules - we want to hear about it!
If you think you’ve found a typo in the rule book - we want to hear about it!
If you have a great idea for a card you’d like to see played in our games - we want to hear about it!
If you have a great idea for a rule that you think we haven’t covered here - we want to hear about it!
We ask that you open a New Issue in our House Rules Issue Tracker so we can keep track of it. We don’t promise to include all of your suggestions into these rules, but we will at least consider them.