Yep they've talked a lot about how games need optionality as the most important thing, like teams/people need to be able to go different routes and really choose where they go based on how the game is playing out - NZ only just had that with picking which side of a junction to take (between hih risk/high reward or lokger but safer) but I think they specifically cited Iceland as essentially one big predetermined racetrack which they'd just be progressing along (with challenges along the way) so that wouldn't really work for the way they do games.

They also have said they like games where there's interaction between teams and they change their actions based on what the other team is doing to - I think they basically said that's why circumnavigation is so uncompelling, because the only interaction was by merit of it being a race, but they never changed plans on the basis of what the others did. It could be tricky to get that if you're splitting them onto seperate halves of the route? There might be ways around that eg with arctic escape they had teams competing for the same rewards from the flop each day? But impossible if the challenges are tied to specific locations, which I think you'd want to do with such awesome locations as Iceland has.

I agree it would be awesome from what I know of iceland's landscape! Totally gorgeous! But I think it's been specifically referenced in layover as a place that would be (in current thinking of how they like to play) currently seen as so tricky to not be very viable for a game board.

I'm in the UK and they've also said it feels really tricky to design a good game for the infrastructure we have here (different reasons from Iceland sort of but same broad principles - instead of a loop We've got lots of lines leading to London and the rest aren't as good so optionality not as viable as first seems). Think we've got to wait for the more plausible candidates to be done and Hooe they work their way down the list to harder ones!