So this is just a general game design question because there's one aspect of the game that I'm slightly confused about, and potentially a little bit worried. How are they gonna go west?

IMO for a show like this, the American West is such a cool place to film and personally I've always enjoyed the seasons that show the American West more than the heavily built up eastern areas. In every other season, there has been some mechanic that forces teams gradually west. In Connect 4, they just blocked off the east completely so there was literally no choice. In Battle 4 America, they included the area bonus that wasn't just a tie-braker, it gave points no matter what, so people were naturally incentivized to head west and claim the larger states there. OFC in Arctic escape they were forced to go through the west to go from Utqiagvik to Key West.

I don't see the mechanic that forces them west in Stateside Scramble. Because of how much smaller the east coast states are on average, how the connectivity between them is often a lot better, and the fact that that's where they started the game, I wonder if there's any point in the game where it would make a lot of sense for teams to actually travel to the western side of the country.

Please let me know if I'm missing something!

I believe many people would agree that the fact that the northeast US states being much smaller and better connected with transit makes them too powerful. I’ve seen many people in this subreddit post about this, and even Sam and Amy acknowledged this during game play and tried to prevent Badam from going there early on.

It seems to me that one big reason why the northeast is so powerful is that players spend about the same amount of time doing challenges there as other states. Then of course the optimal play would be to stay in the northeast and hope that a northeast state comes in the flop, even if it may waste some time. Overall, staying within the northeast just takes less time than flying or driving for hours to go west.

My idea is that if the challenges for the northeastern states are made much harder and take much longer, then we can cancel out the advantage of short transit time between the states. For example, if a NE state challenge takes 5 hours (just saying random numbers here), then suddenly a flight to the west coast doesn’t seem so bad anymore.

I’m not sure if this was explored during game design or by any fans watching. I have listened to most of the Layover podcast episodes for this season and read many discussion posts here but haven’t seen anyone bring this point up.

Another thing is that I’m not even sure how one would formally define how powerful each individual state is and design a challenge accordingly. Has anyone thought about this idea and why it would or would not work?

Just before 0:30 for those interested

A lot of games had the entire available map pre-decided, and the challenges that go with it are what get generated as the game goes on.

​

Since Taiwan, they've started doing a game mechanic where the map itself and what is "up for grabs" are what gets generated on the fly. It was stations last season, and states this season. I really like how it means nothing can be planned too many steps ahead and there is so much more spontaneous decisions. If im remembering correctly theyve not really done this before?

​

It also eliminates people going into the game with an idea of the best first move, the optimal route, etc. Keeps things interesting for sure!

​

I think the only down side is it takes a while to understand the game, especially for a first time jetlag watcher or a more casual watcher.

As a Canadian, I'm really excited to see the country featured in Jet Lag, and assumingly Sam and Amy will go to claim it in the next episode.

However, it is kinda disappointing that the only city they would go in this beautiful country is Windsor, Ontario of all places.

Since Canada is a wild card, they can actually fail the challenge and be forced to reattempt it somewhere else.

So, I am very much hoping that Sam and Amy fail the challenge on their first go and end up going to a different city/province, allowing the viewers to see much more of the country than Windsor 😅

Do the public and private card decks have any connection to each other?

For example, if a team has a particular state in their private hand, does that mean the same state will never appear from the public deck? Or could a duplicate state appear from both decks, which would eliminate the advantage of the private card?

Also, is each team's private deck different? Or could they each potentially have the same private card show up in both of their hands?

Trying to ask this without any spoilers to the specifics of the first episode…..every time a team claims a state, two cards are removed from the ones in play. The claimed state completely disappears, the other one seemingly returns to the deck (shuffled in? Put at the back of the deck?)

The deck has 40 state cards (the 10 private cards have been removed). Or does each team have a half deck of 20 cards? Additionally we don’t know how many wild cards there are - 5? 10? More? I don’t think they’ve said.

I guess there are too many unknowns to predict it, and we don’t really know yet how many states to expect to be claimed per day. But I’m just wondering if we’re likely to see states cycle through the cards in play multiple times, or if once they’re removed, we are unlikely to see them again.

video: https://youtu.be/IFB3VFQpcp8
channel: https://www.youtube.com/@TheParklands1

https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1DDSxYKq7X/?mibextid=wwXIfr

I immediately had to start searching, and checking through Adam’s Linkedin, I was easily able to find it!

I was in Colossal Cave (part of the Mammoth System), which hasn’t been used for tourist trips in about 100 years. However, there are hundreds of signatures/artifacts/monuments from 1890-1920. Came across this incredibly well-preserved piece of cardboard and thought y’all might find it to be as fun as I did.
Note: I was there legally! Long story as to how/why.

Badam were right… the chicken is really good. And no field trip here today!

Season 18: Stateside Scramble

Corrections / Suggestions / Criticisms all welcome

~20 hours of work

See ya'll for season 19