The Great Bagel Chase
In October of last year, I organized a Capture the Flag game that took place across Queens, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Jersey City, Hoboken, and Weehawken. This was the first ever Great Bagel Chase. On Sunday we did it again, this time just over Manhattan. It was really fun! I wanted to take a minute in between the usual AI / Civ6 posting to write out what the game is and how it works, in case it inspires other people to organize their own.
What is the Great Bagel Chase?
The GBC is a capture the flag game inspired by the Jet Lag Youtube channel, which has played similar games like ‘Tag Across Europe’ or ‘Hide and Seek Across Switzerland’.
The goal of the game is to be the first team to retrieve a bagel from each of a set of bagel places scattered around the NYC metro area, and bring them back to a safe zone in the center of the city. You can tag other teams to steal any bagels they are carrying and to freeze them in place for 5 minutes. Players can only use public transit to get around, requiring a good knowledge of the city — especially if you are trying to intercept or steal bagels. Every team has GPS trackers on them so everyone else knows roughly where they are.
The GBC is a great excuse to just run around the city with your friends. And it’s also a fantastic way to discover new bagel joints, of which there are so so many good ones.
The 2024 Rules in Depth
Objective: Be the first team to retrieve a bagel (or a baked good) from 4 out of the 8 designated shops and bring them to the safe zone at Bryant Park. Tag another team to steal any bagels they are carrying and freeze them for 5 minutes. Game ends after the win condition is met, or after 5 hours of play.
Winning two teams will receive gift cards to Russ and Daughters. Everyone else will bask in their glory.
If after 5 hours there is no winner, the team with the most collected bagels will win. If there is a tie, the team that has used the most forms of transit will win (for the purposes of counting, different systems count, but multiple lines on the same system do not count).
The Bagels: Retrieve a bagel with any kind of spread (cream cheese, jam, butter,...) from any of the following locations:
Wu and Nussbaum (Morningside Heights)
The American Museum of Natural History Food Court (Upper West)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art American Wing Cafe (Upper East)
Bagel Works (Upper East)
Black Seed Bagels @ the Rock (Rockefeller Plaza)
Amy's Bread (Chelsea Market)
Tompkins Square Bagels @ Tompkins Square (Alphabet City)
Leo's Bagels (FiDi)
In addition, if you successfully bring a bagel back to Bryant Park from anywhere in Montreal, you'll win automatically.
A helpful map here1:
https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/edit?mid=1391G3tMquxS9yYd62piMT0rabhp8bas&usp=sharing
A few ground rules on bagels:
Only one bagel can be in play per location. If someone beats you to a bagel shop, you either have to tag the current bagel carrier or wait until it gets banked at Bryant Park. (Once a bagel is banked at Bryant Park, you may get another bagel from that location)2
You may not order until you arrive at the store. This includes ordering online.
If the specified bagel is unavailable a substitute is allowed, including other non-bagel baked goods (especially relevant at the museums, which may not have bagels on a given day).
Upon purchasing a bagel, send a picture of yourself holding the bagel to the game group chat.
Send a picture again when reaching Bryant Park with the bagel. Do not consume the bagel until then. Once the bagel has been brought back to Bryant Park, feel free to eat or donate the bagel.
Starting the Game: begin with all teams in Bryant Park at 11AM, Sunday, October 27th. The game will continue for 5 hours or until a team claims victory, ending at latest on 400pm on the same day. The game starts with a 10 minute safe period with no tagging.
Transit: Teams may only take public transit or walk. This includes:
Port Authority buses
Commuter rail (PATH, NJT, LIRR, Metro North, HBLR)
MTA buses
New Jersey jitney buses
Horse drawn carriage3
this excludes:
All car-for-hire (Taxi, Lyft, Uber) and rentals (zip cars, etc)
Personal vehicles, including bikes
Helicopters
Pedicabs
Citi-bike, revel, lime scooters, etc.4
Teams may only use the MTA subway system if they are not carrying a bagel. If you have deposited a bagel at Bryant Park you may use a subway again5.
Tagging: All teams can tag each other outside of the safe zone by sending a picture of the opponents to the game group chat. If two teams tag each other simultaneously, the first picture received by other players determines the tagged team. The tagged team must give any bagels they are carrying that have not been brought to Bryant Park to the tagging team and remain in place for 5 minutes (starting from when they see the message that they have been tagged). The picture must clearly show at least one member of the tagged team, as judged by the other competitors6. If tagged on a train, bus, or other public transit option, get off at the next stop and then begin the timeout period. If tagged while in line or waiting for a bagel, you must step out of line, and the other team may choose to take your place.
Location Trackers: One player from each team must share their location with all other teams at the start of the game using Find My Friends. The teams must stay together.7
Safe Zone: The Safe Zone is Bryant Park and its adjacent streets8. Teams can neither tag nor be tagged in the Safe Zone. Bagels must be returned to Bryant Park proper above ground9.
Organizing your own Bagel Chase
General Game Considerations
The folks who joined us for GBC came for a bunch of reasons. Some came because it was an excuse to see the city. Some because they really liked bagels. But most came because it sounded like a fun way to relive childhood as an adult. As a result, the most important consideration is to make the game fun.
Here are some things that aren’t fun:
waiting on the subway for a really long time
setting up a really good trap only to have the trap be dodged for dumb reasons, like the GPS not working properly
playing ‘defense’ the whole game by just hanging around Bryant park trying to scavenge other people’s bagels
There’s a balancing act here. We want to encourage players trying to tag other players, because that’s where the best and most thrilling stories of the game come from. But we also want to avoid making it so that the only way to win is to steal from other players — that results in everyone not actually going out and exploring the city. All of the rules that we have are, in some sense, in service of this balance. This is why our first year we played in a much larger game area, and in our second year shrunk it considerably.
Considerations on Creating the Bagel Map
By Bagel Map, I mean “the number and locations of the bagel shops being selected for the game”. The bagel map is probably the most critical part to having the game run smoothly. To get the obvious out of the way, you obviously don’t have to just use bagels. It’s thematic, but not important, and if you live in a city without great bagels choose something else that your city has in spades10.
Generally when picking places, you want to consider the following:
How many places are in play? How many do people need to hit to win? This is directly a function of the number of teams. For example, we had 8 bagel joints in play, people had to get 4 to win, and there were 6 teams. This seemed to mostly work out well, though I think we could stand to have even more teams (possibly even 1:1).
How long does it take to get a bagel from this location? Is it so far away that no one is going to ever make the trip? Is the line so long that it’s not worth the effort? Note that in general, lines for bagel shops get shorter later in the day. That means that certain areas have a ‘fixed’ difficulty (they are primarily too far to get to) while others have a ‘variable’ difficulty (they may have too long of a line). This year we included the MET as a bagel location, and no one went there because it was too hard to get too and the lines were too long. We also included Tompkins Square Bagels, which was hard to get to AND had massive lines even pretty late in the day. People did go there, but I think those teams suffered for that choice.
How close is it to other bagel locations? What are the routes from that bagel shop to other bagel shops? How does that play in terms of how people might value going to pick up a harder bagel? This year we had one bagel way up on the upper west side, by Columbia, and another bagel in the American Museum of Natural History. Both of those independently were too hard to get to, but together they were valuable enough for one team to go all the way up to CU and then pick up the AMNH bagel on the way back downtown.
How many different modes of public transit are available? What about unique modes of transit, like ferry? The more options that are available, the more strategic the players can be about how they move around the city.
How late are these places open? Are they likely to unexpectedly close? Generally I aim to choose bagel joints that are explicitly open till 4. We did have one of our bagel joints close earlier than expected this year because someone rented out all of Chelsea Market for a private event. Didn’t expect that to happen, oops. It’s ok to have backups, as long as the rules are clearly communicated in advance.
As a small note, it turns out that people really enjoyed maze-like bagel locations. Last year the game’s best moment was at Port Authority. This year we purposely chose places that were a bit labyrinthine, like the museums, Chelsea Market, or the Rock plaza. I think this let people be a bit more strategic, and led to a lot of thrilling chase moments. It also led to more kinds of knowledge being relevant. For example, if you knew the Rock inside and out, that gave you an edge against other players.
Notes on the tech being used
A key part of the game is keeping tabs on what everyone is doing. It’s common for folks to run out of battery because they are constantly switching between apps, checking GPS locations, and identifying travel routes.
Both years we ran the game, we tried to use Find My Friends to run the GPS tracking. Supposedly Find My is better optimized and higher granularity, so it allowed for longer battery life and better game play. We never really got it to work. Both years we ended up falling back to Google Maps location sharing. This was actually really convenient, because it lets you generate a link that works for a certain amount of hours, and just send that in chat. The GPS tracking worked reasonably well — it was fine grained enough to give you 100 yard radius of where someone was, but lagged behind where they ACTUALLY were by about half a minute. As it turns out this lag / lack of granularity made the game more fun! It allowed for creative hiding spots or juking other teams. That said, the GPS basically didn’t work at all underground, which was a big reason we decided to limit subway use this year.
Both years we ran the game, we used messenger as our big group chat. The group chat serves an important purpose. Besides acting as an adjudication mechanism for controversial tags, it also just lets people chat and joke and send memes about the game. It also allowed people to get rulings on game rules, or to share important information like whether certain bagel places were closing early. Messenger worked well because everyone has it, it uploads images really fast, and it works reasonably well underground. Other options, like discord, really sucked at that last part.
A few soft rules that we had that made it easy for us to work around the limitations of the technology:
If someone asked for your location, you had to post approximately your current cross section.
All rules around tagging and so on had a soft addendum of ‘once you see the message in chat’. For example, if you got tagged but didn’t know, you would have to freeze for 5 minutes once you saw the message.
Things like current scores and which bagel places were open vs not were shared freely whenever anyone requested that info.
Additional Rules and Game Addendums
There are a lot of additional rules and addendums you can add to the game to make it more or less complex. Here are a few that have been suggested / tried out:
Some kind of consumable. This year we implemented Ari’s Rule, so named after the winner of last year’s Bagel Chase. This rule designated a particular bagel bought from Liberty Bagel’s Midtown as a special consumable that made the consuming team immune from being tagged for a period of 5 minutes.
Closing or shifting game locations, hunger games style. We want people to interact more, this is a mechanism to encourage that.
Costumes or some kind of more noticeable indicator of where people are in a crowd. People who know each other have an advantage tagging each other, while people who are relatively unknown have a harder time tagging and easier time blending in. Requiring a particular noticeable outfit decision can even this out.
Changing the locations or sizes in the bagel map. For example, we considered one version of the game where all bagel places were on the rim of Central Park.
The overall point is that this is the skeleton of a game, and you should feel free to add or remove ideas that you think are cool!
That said, you shouldn’t shift the game while it is in play! I think the game may shift a bit while it is being played as people run into edge cases in the rulings or things happen in the city unexpectedly. It’s generally up to the organizer to make these decisions. But I err strongly on not trying to change the game too much midstream — people build strategies based on what they know, and it can feel really unfair if it feels like the game is shifting from underneath you.
Misc thoughts, things we learned
Catch up mechanisms are pretty important. In both years we had one team that fell behind early and basically were out of the game. I’m not sure exactly what the right catch up mechanism is. We accidentally implemented a mild one this year — if you did not have a bagel in hand, you could use the subways — which had the dual effect of making more people come back to Bryant Park more often and led to folks who didn’t have a bagel reach those who did quickly11.
Keep a general eye out for things that may be happening in the city and see if that impacts your choices. This year it turned out that Trump was having a rally at MSG the same day that we were running the GBC. This materially impacted the results of the game — the winning team was in a race against the team that ended up coming in second, and the latter team probably would have won had they not been stuck in traffic.
There was so much more running this year! Removing the subways as a return mechanism meant a lot more people ran or moved on foot, since the buses are always a bit questionable.
There was a feeling that the safe zone was still too generous, even after removing the safety extending underground. Once someone gets near Bryant Park it is pretty easy for them to run to one of the adjacent sidewalks and be safe. Since you can’t tag from the safe zone, there are a lot of possible entry points to cover. I’m not sure exactly what to do about this, except to say that people who got tagged mostly got tagged away from Bryant Park through interceptions.
There’s an interesting balance between attacker vs defender advantage. Because the defender knows the attacker is coming for them (generally) they can set themselves up in a good position for an ambush. It’s a lot easier to see someone moving / running than it is to spot someone standing still in the shadows with a good sight line. On the flip side, the attacker may not have any bagels in hand, while the defender generally does. This means the attacker has much less to lose from being tagged. We saw this dynamic play out a lot throughout the game, where a team would bank a bagel at Bryant Park and then immediately get on the subway to chase down a team with a bagel on a bus somewhere.
Photos and Stories from the Great Bagel Chase
Anime Villain Monologue
During last year’s bagel chase, a team Shoot The Messenger in NJ was coming back to NY by bus. They had two bagels in hand. The NJ bagels in particular were really valuable, because it was hard to get to and from NJ in a reasonable amount of time. Team DAT was lying in wait for them at Port Authority. This team had done the fucking leg work. They canvassed Port Authority, figured out exactly which bus the NJ team was on, figured out exactly which gate they were going to come out of, and then sat lying in wait. And when Shoot the Messenger came out of the bus, boom, DAT got the picture.
And then, instead of sending the picture to the group chat, they just start monologue-ing like an anime villain. As members of team Shoot the Messenger handed over their bagels, team DAT described their meticulous plan. Unfortunately, one of team Shoot the Messenger realized the mistake, and got a counter picture sent to the group chat. 5 minutes later, team DAT could leave Port Authority.
Jogging Behind the Bus
Team Super Dave has two bagels banked and they’re on the bus uptown, about to get their third and put the game into a 3 way tie. They know that team TouchDown — already with 3 bagels banked — is trying to intercept to get the fourth one necessary for the win. Super Dave is on high alert, keeping a close eye on the street with cameras at the ready. Just as their bus pulls into the stop, they spot team TouchDown. They try to get a picture, but it’s too blurry; still, they see that one member of team TouchDown is on the sidewalk as the bus pulls away. They begin to relax a bit, even posting to the chat to gloat that TouchDown missed their chance, until…
The other half of team TouchDown managed to sprint ahead and jump onto the front of the bus just as the doors closed, getting an incredible snipe and putting them in the running for first. Unfortunately, the first half of team TouchDown was still on the sidewalk…and had to spend the next four blocks jogging after the bus to make sure the two teammates were still in the same general radius of their GPS tracker.
You gotta go up to go down
In the final minutes of the GBC, team Apricot Liqueur has three bagels banked and their 4th one in hand. It’s up to team Me and My Friend (my team) to stop them. If we managed to tag Apricot Liqueur, we could get our 4th bagel and win. The problem: they were on a bus moving downtown towards Bryant Park, ready to claim the win. So we ran. Like a lot. And we managed to get into a position where we could intercept them. As we started closing in, Team Apricot Liqueur seemingly jumped off their bus and started moving horizontally. We followed a few streets below, keeping a close eye the whole time and always moving closer to their location. And then, rather strangely, they started going uptown, away from Bryant Park. Not unheard of as a strategy, but with so little time left it was a bit strange. We ran forward two more blocks until we saw it: a row of 5 buses, all in a line, heading downtown. Apricot Liqueur had run a few blocks up to get into one of the buses in this massive line heading right back down. And, now with a huge tactical advantage, the inevitable happened:
Yep. That’s me, squinting through bus windows, phone at the ready, trying to figure out which one to send to the group chat. The answer: none of them, because team Apricot Liqueur won before I even realized what had happened.
This year we just played in Manhattan. I discuss a bit about why in the ‘Organizing your own Bagel Chase’ section. The original Bagel Map from last year is here.
For example, if team A and team B were both going to Bagel Works, and team A gets there first and gets the bagel, team B cannot get a bagel from Bagel Works until team A returns to Bryant Park and banks the bagel. This is to encourage teams hunting other teams.
Mostly as a meme.
We decided these are just way too dangerous — we didn’t want people chasing after each other on bikes through NYC traffic.
In the first year we ran the bagel chase, you could use the subways whenever you wanted. But the subways were way too strong as a transport method, and it fucked with the GPS system and made bagel hunting really difficult. So we decided to limit how much you could use them. More in ‘Organizing your own Bagel Chase’.
For the most part, we’re relying on everyone not being an asshole / being there to have a good time. This worked pretty well — no one tried to point to a blurry spot on some terrible photo and claim that it was one of the competitors.
We also used Google Maps location sharing. It’s critical that people bring powerbanks or chargers!
We included the adjacent streets for safety reasons. We didn’t want people running across the street into traffic in order to try and bank a bagel.
The first year we ran the game, the winning strategy was to just take one of the subways that ran directly under Bryant Park every time you wanted to bank a bagel. That was not that fun, so we made the underground unsafe, but also figured that it wouldn’t matter too much since you couldn’t have bagels on the subway anyway. Turns out it did matter, since there is an underground connection between Times Sq and Bryant Park, and people did try to hunt each other in that tunnel.
You generally want the ‘thing’ you are chasing to be cheap, high quality, in high quantity, and easy to transfer. But there’s so many ways around this — you could use receipts, or different mcguffins being bought from different places. The main goal is ‘does the map look fun’.
In general this led to more tagging, which was good, but it also resulted in a period around an hour before the end of the game where certain teams decided to just play defense instead of go back out into the city to try and snag one more bagel. The first time around, people basically didn’t come back to Bryant Park at all, resulting in many more bagel places being ‘out of commission’ for more of the game.