Four Idiots take on the Prague Mind Maze
“I want to be at Charles Bridge for sunset tonight so I can take photos.”
“Yeah, we should have enough time to get there for it”
“What do you mean? We have nothing planned other than walking around and making Pivo stops.”
“I booked something for 4:30pm. It’s a surprise. “
“If you booked us on a segway tour, I’m not going. Those things are so lame.”
“Don’t you worry, it’ll be fun…”
And that’s how we found out Matt booked us on a secret activity which we spent the next 4 hours hassling him about trying to guess what it was. Finally, after a particularly vague hint of “it’s more mental than physical” I guessed it – a live ‘escape room’ game called Mind Maze.
The Prague Mind Maze
The first time I heard of a Mind Maze escape room was when we were in Cologne last year. It was one of the top rated activities on TripAdvisor there which is also true for Prague. We had spoken about doing it at the time in Cologne but when its just the two of you there we thought it might be a little lame and Matt thought since there were the four of us this time we should definitely take advantage and give it a go.
The premise of Mind Maze, like all the other escape room games that have popped up all around European cities, is that you are locked in a room full of puzzles and clues which you have to solve together in order to unlock yourselves from the room.
And you have only one hour to do it.
Sounds pretty easy, right?
Wrong.
We chose to do the first room they set up at Prague Mind Maze called the Alchemist’s Chamber. The goal was to solve all the clues and find the Philosopher’s Stone that can turn any metal in to gold.
Clearly I wasn’t really listening to the instructions before we entered the room because I fully expected them to at least give us the first hint and point us in the right direction. They didn’t. It took 15 minutes of us picking up random objects, taking the room to pieces and looking around with confused expressions before we reluctantly asked for a hint on our walkie talkie. Which was so obvious we felt like idiots for asking.
The fact that every 15 minutes our intense concentration was interrupted by some eerie hooting owls coming over the speaker made us panic early when we weren’t making headway.
I can’t really explain all the fun little puzzles and codes we had to solve (that would kind of ruin it for everyone who wants to try the Prague Mind Maze!) but there was a recurring theme of us asking for hints over the next hour.
We found ourselves being several steps ahead and solving the complex clues quite quickly but could not for the life of us figure out the easy and obvious clues that were staring us right in the face.
So did we escape?
We finally had a few breakthroughs right at the end and our ‘official’ time to escape the room was a very convenient 59:59….cut it close didn’t we?
Afterwards the girl working there told us that there was another room that we could try called Enigma “…but it’s quite a bit harder”.
Maybe next time!
We had a lot of fun and definitely learnt to not expect every clue to be impossible to figure out. We had so much fun that I know I’ll be checking to see if any future destinations have another Mind Maze for us to try. It also turns out there’s one close to where we live so we’re planning on going there to redeem our horrible first attempt.
Awesome! We actually just tried one of these in Hanoi and it was so much fun! We cracked the first room but the second one, which was a Saw-themed room (like the horror movie), had us stumped! I now want to try this game in all the cities we visit 🙂
I love that these are popping everywhere – so much fun! Did you do it just the two of you? We put it off before because we thought it might not be as fun if it was just the two of us.
Then you should try it in Prague, something related to the alchemy would be the best option. 🙂 As a local I could recommend you escape games made by Questerland – http://www.questerland.cz/en/home, even locals go there, which means this is some quality stuff.