Knightmare.com Go Mad in Manchester

By Mashibinbin

Have you ever wondered what a bunch of Knightmare fans would fare in the Crystal Maze? Well wonder no more.


On Saturday, August 4th 2018, 5 members of Knightmare community, one of their husbands and 2 plucky locals took on the Crystal Maze Experience in Manchester. That is to say 60% of the Knightmare.Com staff (Drassil, Mystara and myself) plus Forester, Greystagg and her hubby all met up in Manchester to take on the challenge. After a delicious meal at Albert's Shed we headed to our allocated briefing time. We were joined also by two local lasses that tagged along and for purposes of GDPR (we never asked any permission to include them on this site) I shall refer to them as M1 and M2. We disposed of our bags and valuables in handy lockers, posed for a photo for the first time in those inimitable jackets and perspired more than a person whose secrets have been uncovered in the heat we endured. We had an initial pep talk and suffered the ignominy of having myself as Captain and M1 was my Vice. (not like that you filthy lot!) We were then treated to some footage placing us firmly back in the 1990s and our childhoods became alive again once more. Our Maze Master was the mistress of mayhem that is known as Pamela Bloom. Her backstory was that of a former carer of children who encouraged them to play with fire rather too much and Mumsie took pity on her after her unjustified sacking. We only had one lock-in and that was in our very first game with Mystara. Thankfully he got his riddle correct afterwards and we didn't begin with the shame of -1 crystals. On reflection you can see how it happened but it didn't dampen our spirits in any way. We made our way across the 4 traditional zones with the Ocean zone casually forgotten about - maybe Global Warming has had another dramatic effect not yet reported. Some games were ported straight across from the show and others were new for the experience. There were several opportunities to sweat more in the jackets and pose for additional photos. Some of the games were easier than others and it was truly the luck of the draw what you got. Although I didn't cover myself in any glory personally gaining no crystals the team overall did exceptionally well and M1 and M2 were valuable assets to the team. We managed to get 11 of the initial 16 games as victories and even gained a bonus game for Forester withe rest of us having to face two each. In the Crystal Dome there were only Gold tokens to collect and no floor scraping was permitted. Following further chastisement for Mystara for trying to be a Smart Bottom (there's only room for one of those in the Knightmare universe after all) we managed a highly impressive haul of 245 tokens which placed us as 14th placed overall team for the week. It's not a cheap day out but it is one to my reckoning that represented good value for money and was a lot of fun in the company of trusted friends nearby the environment where I first met one of them nearly 20 years ago! What are you waiting for? go out and win some Crystals!

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