The biggest draw of Urban Playground in Manchester has got to be their live version of TV gameshow The Cube. You’ve seen it on TV, now it’s your chance to take on THE CUBE Live Experience yourself. It may look easy when you’re watching at home, but once you’re in the perspex box the pressure can make the tasks a lot trickier.
We checked in on arrival and were shown to the first touchscreen board, where you scan your barcode you received when booking. Here a member staff explains the game and you watch a video of how to play. You then pick your teams and give yourself a team name. To play the Cube you have to be in teams of two as some challenges you work together and others you work alone.
We split into teams. Daddy with the eldest daughter (age 11) and Mummy with the youngest (age 8).
This version allows you to play 7 original games from the TV series as you battle to score the highest amount of points. You get 3 lives per game and you score more points per game depending on how many life remains at the end of each game. Scores start low but they progress as the games get harder. You get two lifelines which you can only use once during your experience, one being simplify, which makes one game easier. The other being swap, which allows during a single player challenge to swap with your team mate.
Each experience is different to the last and the challenges played are selected at random by The Cube Live system. To keep track of each game, you have a a member of staff who helps you navigate throughout the challenges and also runs them for you.
Surprisingly my little 8 year old did really well and understood the challenges well. As a family we really enjoyed the challenges and as teams we got rather competitive. We must have felt every emotional while we played our 2 hour game, we were laughing, shouting, feeling tense and elated.
Some games only lasted a few minutes each especially when timed challenges but we had time between each Cube while we waited our turn to chat about the game and to even speak to our team mate about tactics in secret.
It was so different to anything we have done before and we had so much fun I would really recommend giving the Cube a try.
