Take the Kids to SpySpace Spy Experience in New York City

After opening in 2018, SpyScape quickly became a thing to do in New York City for families. The experience, developed with help from the former head of training at British Intelligence, is designed for friends and families with children ages 12 and up. It combines fiction and reality to create a spy experience using interaction, storytelling and skill tests.

One of SpyScape’s missions is to reveal extraordinary skills that each person possesses — skills spies, ordinary people with skills just like ours, use every day, from empathy and analytical skills to perception. During the experience, your family will discover and develop spy skills you likely already use in your day-to-day life.

SpyScape features galleries of real spy gadgets and tales from the trade. Learn about the Enigma machine used during World War II (and test your own code-breaking skills with encryption challenges). Meet double agents from history (and test your own lying and lie-detection skills), as well as journalists who’ve used spy skills to accomplish exceptional feats. Learn about hacking, Special Ops and more.

A separate exhibition currently features a look at James Bond and his gadgets, including his iconic Aston Martin DB5.

SpyScape holds public events on a regular basis, including adult evenings with food and drinks included in the visit and a spy school for students.

Most recently, SpyScape launched a new Priceless Mission Control experience with the help of Mastercard. The new experience allows visitors to take control of CCTV cameras, interact with telepresence robots, send 360-degree audio waves through the surveillance gallery and project their own covert messages.

Tickets for the Priceless Mission Control experience are available to Mastercard cardholders exclusively, and tickets include access to the rest of the SpyScape experience. The exclusive Priceless Mission Control experience is available all through 2020 and takes about two hours. It’s suitable for groups of up to two to six people and is scheduled on a case-by-case basis. While the SpyScape experience as a whole is recommended for children ages 12 and up, children 9 and up are admitted to the Priceless Mission Control experience.

Reviews credit SpyScape as not your average tourist trap or escape room-style gimmick. One traveler’s recent TripAdvisor review noted, “The Spy Museum is an excellent small museum on a specific subject — espionage — that combines authentic historical objects used in deception, encryption, computer hacking and related fields, with terrific interactive elements, including a quiz to determine the person’s aptitude to be a spy. My wife and I took our 10-year-old grandson, who had a great time, but we were surprised how much we enjoyed it too. The exhibits on spies who were exposed, such as the FBI agent Rober Hansen, and on the frightening possibilities of computer malware, were very informative and impressive, as were many other exhibits.”