The Crystal Maze was everyone’s favourite 90’s TV show, so we were pretty excited when we found out there was a Kickstarter campaign to recreate the famous Crystal Maze experience in London. We backed the campaign and a few months later our team went to try out the ultimate team challenge.
The experience began with an introductory video featuring Richard O'Brien himself welcoming us to the Crystal Maze, we then met our Maze Master Leo, who led us around the maze with as much energy and charisma as O’Brien himself!
James was selected as our team captain, with Ed as vice-captain, starting in the Industrial Zone. The challenges were organised into four types: skill, mental, physical and mystery. Neil kicked things off with a physical challenge, where he had to climb up a big rope frame to get to the crystal in the top corner of the room. Just to make it that bit harder, lots of bells were attached to the ropes, which if sounded more than three times, meant automatic lock in, followed by a stint in the Industrial jail! Neil succeeded in completing the task and gained our first crystal.
After completing another four games in the Industrial zone we moved on to the Futuristic zone, this was not our best zone as we lost two of our team, James and Neil, to the jail. We upped our game in the Medieval zone and won a further three crystals, using two to buy our teammates out of jail. Medieval meant another haul of crystals with some brilliant games, including Matt having to roll inside a barrel to move cannon balls from one end of the room to the other, it looked very hard work but it paid off as he emerged from the challenge with crystal in hand.
The Aztec zone was, of course, everyone’s favourite. It felt like we were really on the set of the classic show when we entered and were surrounded by sand and ruins in the ancient village. After completing another fantastic set of challenges, we completed the maze with a total of 9 crystals (unfortunately having to give four back to get people out of jail, nevermind) and two drinks tokens too. That meant 25 seconds in the Crystal Dome.
When it was our teams turn to enter the Crystal Dome we made the most of it, jumping around like maniacs trying to grab as many gold tokens as we could. We can confirm that collecting the tokens is a lot harder than it looks!
Overall the experience was absolutely brilliant, we were very impressed with how similar it was to our favourite 90's show. Lots of running around, great challenges, fun and laughs were had, and we can’t wait to go back and do it all again.
Find out more about The Crystal Maze on their website.
