Spyscape in New York

I’ve wanted to visit the Spyscape Museum Experience in NYC for a while, as it has a top rating on Google and Trip Advisor. All these people can’t be wrong?

There are two parts to Spyscape—the museum and the experience—and they are efficiently intertwined.

The Museum

The exhibits provide information about all things espionage, including various cool gadgets and stories. The museum houses an Enigma machine and a U2 spy plane camera. There is an optional 007 Exhibition that any James Bond fan needs to see because it’s the first of its kind in NYC.

The Experience

The purpose of the experience is to find out what role you would play in the espionage world. I would allow at least 90 minutes to participate. To start, you are provided with personalized bracelets that you scan at each interactive section. The entry is a very Disneyesque debriefing on this huge elevator that takes you to the start of the exhibit.

The tasks that assess your espionage skills include codebreaking, a lie detector test, a surveillance task, and the infamous laser tunnel. They were all designed with the utmost attention to detail and were lots of fun. The lie detector was interesting in that it taught you subtle signs that someone is lying. The surveillance was my favorite as it took a lot of effort to put together and was very intricate. You enter this large room with at least 40 camera views of various locations and you need to find the described scene. Some were very hard to find!

At the end of the experience, you retrieve your espionage role and it is also emailed to you.

The Website

The website provides more activities such as an online spychology program, designed by a former Head of Training at British Intelligence. This is included with your experience. You can even sign up for a weekly puzzle.