28 June 2025
Get ready, London! It’s your turn to participate in the award-winning TV hit, Race Across The World. This unique urban adventure invites you to step into a small part of a show watched by millions, right here in the capital. Strategy, teamwork, and sharp thinking are all crucial for success. Every route and option you choose will significantly impact your experience as you race against the clock and other teams. With no maps and no public transport allowed, will you make the right choices and claim victory?
This experience is expertly crafted by the team at CityDays, renowned for their collection of outdoor escape rooms and scavenger hunts across London and other bustling locations. We had the opportunity to play another fantastic experience by them last year, which you can read more about by CLICKING HERE!
Race Across The World challenges participants on a 4-5km mission through the capital, typically taking between 2-3 hours to complete. You’ll navigate through iconic landmarks, key venues, and hidden gems, aiming to reach three designated checkpoints to complete your mission. Since not every journey is the same, every decision you make is critical to reaching the finish line quickly.
The experience is highly flexible, playable any day from 9 AM to approximately 7 PM. To book, simply visit their official website and purchase your tickets based on the number of players, desired date, and time slot. Tickets start from £25 per person, though pricing varies depending on the chosen date and group size. Larger teams have the option to split into smaller units for an internal race, adding a competitive edge. Setting everything up at home before your race day is incredibly straightforward.
As a team of six, we chose to embark on this adventure on a sunny Sunday in London. Following the instructions, we met at the designated location and pressed ‘start’ to begin our race. Our initial task was to retrieve a package from a local coffee shop, which served as a mini-tutorial before the official race commenced. Once we had the package, we faced our first puzzle: solving it using different currencies and submitting the answer via WhatsApp.
From there, we were given a budget and had to choose between two options for our next set of instructions: an easy route or a more challenging one. The easier option naturally cost more from our budget, while the harder option allowed us to save money. With three checkpoints to clear and time being critical, we decided to tackle the hard option for the first leg. Despite the vague directions, we maintained a good pace, navigating through many hidden roads and passageways. Along the way, we had to answer questions to unlock subsequent directions, ensuring we didn’t skip any parts. We successfully reached the first checkpoint in an impressive 30 minutes!
Moving straight into the second checkpoint, we made a collective team decision to opt for the harder route once more. To our dismay, this leg proved significantly more challenging than the first. The directions were written in rhyming Old English, making it quite difficult for us to decipher our path. We actually got lost a few times, and to get back on track, we had to use the ‘lost’ feature, which, as expected, deducted money from our budget. Taking almost 90 minutes on this second leg, we were genuinely shocked by our slow progress and the increased difficulty.
Before our final leg, we decided to take a much-needed break at a local pub, enjoying a drink while strategizing our comeback. With a minimal amount remaining in our budget, we realized we needed to earn some in-game currency. This “working” involved solving a puzzle sent to us; a correct solution would add currency to our balance. While more money also helps reduce time at the end, the longer you spend solving these puzzles, the more double time is added to your final score! This certainly added a significant amount of pressure to solve them quickly.
As we began our last leg, we opted for the easy option, which, as expected, provided much clearer directions. This proved to be our easiest section, leading us to wonder if we should have chosen this option earlier. We completed this segment in approximately 30 minutes. Our final destination was a seemingly random pub, where our last puzzle awaited us inside. With the clock ticking for this section as well, we quickly solved the final challenge in about 3 minutes to stop our race time.
We crossed the finish line with a total race time of 2 hours, 34 minutes, and 26 seconds. This raw time was then adjusted based on our in-game performance: we earned a 24-minute reduction thanks to our budget bonus, but accrued 16 penalty minutes from “working” commitments and an additional 10 minutes for incorrect answers. In total, we had three incorrect answers, completed six “working” puzzles, used four hints, and got lost three times. Looking back, our performance on the second leg was notably challenging, accounting for most of our time, budget expenditure, and problems.
We really loved how the experience cleverly utilized routes and the surrounding environment to craft the puzzles. Since some of the areas were new to all of us, it was a fantastic and alternative way to explore London, even as locals. We saw many wonderful spots and locations that we might otherwise have missed. We particularly enjoyed the use of the physical pack at the start of the race and the final challenge inside the pub.
That said, we felt the “Race Across The World” overlay was somewhat loosely applied, with only a light connection to the TV show. Additionally, the second trail presented a significant jump in difficulty from the first leg, which made it quite challenging for us. However, we understand that this is an inherent risk when making choices in such a game, and it proved to be our downfall on this occasion.
We finished in the top 57% of players, which we consider a great achievement given the challenges we faced! Receiving a small magnet memento at the end was a nice touch, capping off an enjoyable day out with friends, solving puzzles, and exploring London on foot.
A huge thank you to the team for allowing our group of six to play for free in return for our review and video. All thoughts expressed are based solely on our individual experience. It’s important to remember that each experience can be very different; the routes we took and what we encountered could vary greatly from your own adventure. This means even if we played again, we’d have no advantage!
For more experiences and to book your own race across London, head to the official website.
@thrillnation We checked out @RaceAcrossTheWorld Experience in London! #RaceAcrossTheWorldTheExperience #London #EscapeRoom #Thingstodo #Summer ♬ Adventure - André Branney
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