‘Jet Lag: The Game’ Team Breaks Down Season 10 Finale’s Airport Twist and the ‘Desert Power’ Effect (2024)

SPOILER ALERT:This interview contains spoilers from the Season 10 finale of “Jet Lag: The Game,” now streaming onNebula.

“Jet Lag: The Game” dropped its Season 10 finale Wednesday on Nebula, featuring the epic conclusion to the Down Under saga of the travel game show and the presentation of a cartoon-kangaroo-balloon-shaped trophy to either Adam Chase and Ben Doyle or Sam Denby and two-time guest player Toby Hendy.

When the trek-across-Australia-territories gambling game was said and done, it was Hendy and Denby declaring they were Jet Lagged, leaving Chase and Doyle in complete shock at the upset because 1) They did not expect Hendy (who is now twice undefeated at “Jet Lag”) and Denby’s to head to the Gold Coast Airport, and had no idea about its location on the border of Queensland and New South Wales, and 2) Chase and Doyle had amassed a truly impressive amount of “Desert Power” (and “Dune” references) while in the Outback that they believed would take them all the way to the win.

In the interview below, the “Jet Lag: The Game” team unpacks the Season 10 finale’s twists and turns with Variety.

Ben and Adam – can you break down losing the “Desert Power” and the moment you realized you weren’t going to win?

BEN DOYLE: Oh, it was devastating. I think some people might think we just edited it this way, but we were literally certain that we were going to win the game until the last, like, half hour.

ADAM CHASE: We entered the day with so much Desert Power. And we really thought the only thing that would prevent us from winning is if we didn’t make our flights. Which as you saw, we did have a ton of trouble with. The flight we’d planned on taking was sold out, so we never made it to the Canberra-New South Wales border the way we’d intended. But when we managed to pull off the connection via Sydney to Melbourne, we were confident we had won. It was wild to go, in a single moment, from basically 100% confidence that we would win, to 100% knowledge that we had lost. It turned out that while we did have a lot of Desert Power, we had, in fact, not been able to see all possible futures.

DOYLE: Maybe I shouldn’t reveal this in a… publication, but when we were filming all of that footage of us going “oh, well, anything could happen!” we thought the whole thing was a joke. We were like, “guess we gotta give the audience something to chew on, since we’re definitely about to win.”

Sam, explain the discovery of the Gold Coast Airport’s border location during the gameplay vs. in prep for the game?

SAM DENBY: In prepping for this season, none of us had ever really considered the possibility that there could be incentive to go to anywhere but the largest cities in each region—partially because the ability to deposit budget anywhere in a region was a last-minute change. Originally, we had designed the game so that you had to go to the challenge board first before depositing budget. So with the ability to deposit budget anywhere, there’s therefore more incentive to be right on a region border, but I don’t think any of us could have guessed that there’d be a major airport literally bisected by the border. As soon as Toby mentioned that to be on day one I knew we had a leg-up since I was also pretty sure that Ben and Adam didn’t know about “the Gold Coast hack.” This really gave us an advantage on the last day both by having a winning strategy that was not very dependent on tight flight connections and by having one that would keep Ben and Adam thinking they were winning, and therefore potentially keeping them a bit off their game, until the last minute.

What “wins” from challenges are you most proud of from Season 10?

CHASE: I think mine are obvious, which are hitting the bogey at Alice Springs Golf Course on the first hole, and getting the waiting 30 minutes challenge to within the second. Both of those, I think, were especially satisfying because one, they were big gambles we pretty much needed to win, and two, because Ben simply did not think I could do either of them. Ben was kind of a Chani figure—he did not believe that I was the Lisan Al-Gaib, and that I could accumulate quite that much Desert Power. But to his credit, he was willing to trust me when I asked him to.

DOYLE: I was so ready to lose a thousand dollars.

CHASE: It was also fun to read comments of people as they were watching the episode, because the nearly universal reaction, especially to the choice to wager $1,000 on “Wait 30 Minutes,” was “Adam is incredibly overconfident on this, it’s a huge mistake, and it’s going to ruin their game” and I enjoyed waiting a few minutes for them to see how it played out.

One last thing I’ll mention is that many people pointed out that the key to my success was that I walked at an extremely consistent rhythm, which is famously what attracts sand worms. So I was kind of doing the opposite of a sand walk. Which maybe explains why the following day we were kind of eaten by the giant sand worm that was Sam and Toby’s strategy.

DOYLE: I think for me, my wins were emotional support wins. So I also take credit for everything that Adam just said. And the Tim Tam! That was hard, right?

DENBY: Toby and I had a pretty incredible streak of back-to-back challenges that we thought we were going to lose but ultimately won in Canberra. We went to the science museum, Questacon, and studied for a good 90 minutes, but as soon as we exited and pulled up the quiz questions we had to answer our hearts dropped as they were nothing close to the type of questions we’d studied for. But ultimately through some educated guesses we just barely got it right.

And then right from there we went to the portrait gallery, where we were sure we’d find a portrait of Queen Elizabeth II, considering she was also the Queen of Australia, but she was nowhere to be found and all the portraits were of rather niche people. But Toby accurately guessed that the Australian audience would accurately identify former Olympian Cathy Freeman. So this back-to-back sequence felt like a big win considering it absolutely was not a given.

What did you discover about the mechanics of the gambling gameplay during the season and how it affected the choices you made in challenges and steals?

CHASE: The more we’ve designed games, the more we’ve realized that what makes challenges compelling is stakes. In many seasons, we’ve had challenges that couldn’t be failed, and sometimes the only stakes were, like, will it take them 10 minutes to do this, or 20 minutes—which sometimes, depending on the game, that 10 minutes was significant enough to give it stakes, but certainly there were many times when it wasn’t.

What was nice about the gambling was it gave each challenge clear stakes—if you fail, you will lose the money you’ve wagered. It also meant that, because each challenge was a risk, there was much less incentive to just grind through as many challenges as possible—which is another thing we really focus on in game design, is reducing the incentive to grind challenges, just because that gets boring. We tend to want a gameplay loop of do some travel, do some challenges, some travel, some challenges, so on.

The final thing we thought it did nicely was allow for big swings in the game. Teams could suddenly gain a lot of money or lose a lot of money, and you saw that—who had more money, and arguably who was in the lead, was frequently changing, which to us is another mark of a well-designed game.

There were two key things about steals, which were both made possible by the fact that steals risked a fixed percentage of your money to take a fixed percentage of the opponent’s money. One is that it encouraged teams to keep their balances relatively low. I think that without steals, teams would have had too much incentive to just spend the first two or three days building up a crazy balance, probably not traveling very much, and then at the end, just fly around and deposit. Which obviously still happened to a certain extent, but would have happened to a much greater extent otherwise.

The second thing steals did—and this ended up being less relevant than it might have been if things played out differently—is that they offered a way for teams that were far behind to catch back up. If I have $10 and you have $10,000, a 50% steal risks $5 for me, and I might win $5,000 from you. We call those game mechanics “Blue Shells,” and they’re really important for making the game remains competitive, and thus the show stays engaging. And in this game, steals were the key Blue Shell.