‘Monopoly Lifesized is a fantastic day out inside the classic board game’
If you ever wondered what it’d be like to step inside your favourite board game, Monopoly Lifesized is a chance to experience the family classic in a whole new way, writes Sam Lawrie.
I visited the immersive event, conveniently located on Tottenham Court Road, to see if my friends and I could sweep some properties and come out on top against three other teams.
The entire building is themed to the original game, including the classy Top Hat Bar and Restaurant, which was decorated with Christmas wreaths and colourful baubles to add a festive touch.
The experience itself is inspired by the much-loved game, but it’s been given an interactive twist with a series of hands-on challenges and puzzles to complete as your team travels around the board.
We played on the City Board, but there are four in total to choose from, including the Classic Board, Luxury Board, and Own It All Board.
We were led into the room by our two human tokens, who helped amp up the atmosphere with bags of enthusiasm, and greeted by a life-sized Monopoly board with London properties including Pall Mall, Fenchurch Street and Regent’s Street.
Each round gives you a chance to roll the dice and step inside a miniature escape room with timed challenges for your team to complete.
You don’t get time to go inside every room, unfortunately, but our games included spotting patterns in the toy shelves at Hamleys and lighting up the billboards in Piccadilly Circus.
You could also choose to build properties or solve more logic-based puzzles, such as spot the difference or unscrambling anagrams, to win more money in between rounds.
Our team started strong by smashing the first game and building a house and hotel on Pall Mall, but it went downhill from there, and we soon realised that maybe our strengths didn’t lie in time-pressured, hands-on games.
Luckily, we didn’t get sent to jail, but we did finish in fourth place and, while that may have prompted some grumbles among the more competitive players on our team, I wasn’t really fussed about the leaderboard because I’d had so much fun playing the game.
Book your tickets to Monopoly Lifesized here.
It’s a fantastic experience – the only downside is that it wasn’t long enough! It felt like we were only just getting into the swing of things when the timer buzzed and we’d come to the end, but our whole team agreed we easily could’ve done another 30 minutes or more.
We finished off with a browse in the gift shop and a Christmas cocktail in one of the cosy booths at the Top Hat Bar, which was a lovely way to decompress after all that fast-paced puzzle-solving.
Even though we didn’t manage to become property moguls, we still had a brilliant afternoon playing this new version of an old favourite – and at least no one could flip the board this time.
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