Around the World in 80 Ways

A geography quiz hosted by travel presenter Simon Reeve.

Where are we? Simon reads clues to a country; they're discrete clues, statements with a clear ending. Buzz in and get it wrong, and the team's frozen out from the next clue.

Buzz in and get it right and the team get to choose their route. For the first episode, the journey was from Moldova to Paris, either via a northern route (through Poland, Ukraine, Germany, and Luxembourg), or a southern route (through Romania, Hungary, Croatia, and Italy). Do you think you know more about Luxembourg or Croatia?

To move on the journey, teams answer questions about their proposed destination. If you want to go to end up in Italy, you're answering a question about Italy.

Teams are required to move from one country to the next, but there are shortcuts. A "train" will allow the team to take two steps along the track, and a "plane" gives them three steps. Part-performance is rewarded, so if you try to fly to Italy and only get two questions right, you're still moving to Croatia. Each team only gets one "train" and one "plane" for each show.

There's a further help, "tourist information" from Simon is a hint about the question, which sounds like it is improvised on the spot. Each team gets two "tourist information" hints for the programme.

Arrival in France gets a team to the border, they then need to answer four more questions about France to get to the destination and win the game. Get one wrong and the other team have their chance to move; the final could and should boil down to knowledge of the destination country.

Boiled down to its basics, it's a first-to-nine race about European geography (and, in the second pilot show, West African geography). The production was particularly cluttered, a lot of sound effects and noises took us out of the flow.

The Radio Times said,

Another inventive quiz pilot, this one's theme is geography. Two teams race to the same destination via different routes. If they get a question about a country wrong, they’re stopped at the border, although clues can be had from tourist information. TV's well-travelled Simon Reeve doesn't do badly in his debut as quizmaster. This show doesn't have the limitless potential of the maths-based Your Number's Up, but it's similarly informative and in with a chance of returning as a series.

One of four quiz shows given two-episode pilot runs during summer 2026: the others were Bookmarks, Déjà News, and Your Number's Up. Weaver's Week reviewed them all.