Review: Race Across The World - The Experience

This London-based experience, based on the hit BBC series, has racers set off on a city-wide foot adventure against the clock to uncover some of the city's best hidden spots.

Image: Race Across The World - The Experience

Race Across The World: The Experience, based on the hit BBC series, is the latest city-wide treasure hunt experience from CityDays. While the TV series the experience is based on has competitors racing for 50-plus days across multiple countries with little more than a map, a GPS tracker, and several thousand pounds to pay for travel, lodging, and food, this new London-based race runs anywhere from 2 to 4 hours and sees those taking part cover roughly 5km on foot through Central London.

Staples of the BBC series - including budget management and navigating without a map - have been carried over and make up the core experience, which feels like the closest adaptation of the TV series possible without requiring a passport or more than an afternoon of your time.

For us, our team of two began racing on a sunny Saturday afternoon outside of Liverpool Street station. The race kicked off with a dash to a nearby business (for us, a quiet pub about 10 minutes away from the main line station) to collect a black Race Across The World: The Experience branded envelope from behind the bar. Within it, eight banknotes and four see-through sheets with markings. The experience's instructions, which are all delivered via WhatsApp, told us to inspect the banknotes closely, as they were key to discovering the first pit stop location, whilst the see-through sheets would be needed to solve a physical puzzle later in the first leg.

Photo: Immersive Rumours

With a destination for the first leg figured out, one of Race Across The World's most important components - our team's budget - came into play. Just like in the show, each team is provided with a travel budget to spend on their race, totalling £30 (roughly the price of a black cab from Liverpool Street to the experience's final location).

In each of the experience's three legs, you're presented with two options for directions, each with differing prices. Those with the cash to spare can pay over the odds for clear and concise directions, while those looking to be more frugal can pay less for more obtuse directions that require some lateral thinking to decode. While some set points throughout the race are the same for all teams, your chosen character's directions can lead you down very different paths from those who pick the alternative, making every choice you make matter all the more.

With prices ranging from £10 to £25 for directions each leg, teams also need to pick up 'work' that comes in the form of riddles and puzzles that can be done on the move to top up their budget. If the price of directions isn't already high enough to make a team's wallet cry, there are time penalties for incorrect answers and monetary charges for those who require hints or directions if properly lost to also think about.

Keen to get moving as soon as possible, but with one eye on each navigator's prices, we opt for The Tourist, who was the cheaper of our two options. While their instructions weren't always the easiest to follow, we were able to make good time and were well on our way to our first pit stop, until we hit an unexpected roadblock...

Photo: Andreas Karamalikis

A key part of Race Across The World: The Experience is that racers interact with and explore the real world. By using publicly accessible parts of the city, there are no doubt going to be situations that arise which are outside of the creator's control. We ran into one such situation after turning a corner on the outskirts of the Liverpool Street area, when we were met with a large cordon around the sculpture we needed to reach, thanks to a film crew setting up to shoot.

With police guarding the closed area and a large group of protestors nearby, we had a brief, albeit tense, conversation with a police officer in which they told us to turn around. They were predictably unsympathetic to us saying we were just trying to do a treasure hunt, so we had no choice but to spend more of our rapidly dwindling budget on hints in order to progress.

Thankfully, this unplanned detour didn't detract from the experience and, in our case, actually added to it by forcing us to quickly improvise and work out alternative routes to get back on track with the clock still ticking away, though we'd be lying if we said we weren't still bitter about the hit to our in-game budget.

Photo: Race Across The World - The Experience

While several of the locations we ended up visiting throughout the afternoon were familiar to us from our collective 20-plus years of living in the city, being a local didn't give us any inherent advantage over those less familiar with the geography of London. The experience relies heavily on smaller back streets away from the hustle and bustle, so even the most knowledgeable Londoners will likely end up somewhere they've never been before.

Each of the race's pit stops gives you a breather in some of the city's most photogenic urban areas, and with the clock paused, teams are free to take as long or short a break as they like before resuming the race. During each of these rest periods, an update as to your team's total time so far compared to other races is delivered via WhatsApp, allowing you to see how efficiently you've made it through each of the legs. While those with a competitive side will find themselves obsessing over how much time they've gained or lost in each leg and cursing every red pedestrian traffic light, we suspect even the most casual of players will enjoy seeing how they're stacking up against other racers.

Outside of navigating the capital without a map, one of Race Across The World: The Experience's biggest strengths is that it forces you to engage and look at the city around you differently. Racers will spend a lot of time searching for small details on buildings, interrogating the text on memorials and statues, and searching for monuments to the past that you'd otherwise walk past without a second thought. Much like in the show, the most rewarding moments of this London-based experience come when you're exploring the road less travelled.

Photo: Robert Bye

A couple of hours into our race, and with the clock still ticking, we approached the final destination in our city-wide race - a waterfront pub to the east of the city. Uttering a code phrase to the bar staff secured us our final puzzle of the day - a padlocked bag containing the guestbook - and after working out the correct combination thanks to a collection of postcards from various globetrotters, all that was left to do was add our names to the guestbook, collect our Race Across The World keepsakes, and have a well-earned drink as the sun began to set.

While London has no shortage of scavenger hunt experiences (CityDays has 11 other experiences available, with other companies offering similar themed experiences across all four corners of the city), Race Across The World: The Experience's combination of exploration, budget management and puzzling makes it a great family-friendly activity for those looking to get out and experience the city.

For us, Race Across The World: The Experience more than lived up to the promise of delivering on the show's best bits, and stands out as one of the city's best treasure hunt experiences. This is a race we'd happily run again.

★★★★

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Race Across The World: The Experience runs across Central London until 13th August 2025. Tickets are priced from £25.00 per person. For more info and to book tickets, visit raceacrosstheworldexperience.com

For more reviews of immersive experiences like Race Across The World: The Experience, check out our recent Reviews.