Darts, ping pong, axe throwing and virtual clay pigeon shooting. The whole competitive socialising business, judged on the only measure that matters here, which is whether you arrive dry.
16 August 2026 · 4 min read
Somewhere in the last decade London decided that drinking in a room was insufficient, and that the room should also contain a thing you could be bad at.
The industry calls this competitive socialising. Nobody has ever said those two words out loud to a friend. What it means in practice is a bar with a scoreboard, and it has quietly become the most weatherproof night out the city sells, because almost all of it lives in basements and railway arches with a roof over the entire proposition.
There is a second thing nobody puts in the marketing. These places are extremely good for a group in which two people have never met, because it is impossible to have an awkward silence when somebody has to throw next.
Cheapest first.
Retro machines, a beer, and nothing else asked of you. There is no host, no briefing, no wristband and no upselling, which after a few of the venues further down this list starts to feel like a luxury rather than an absence.
Bring coins and low expectations and you will have a better evening than the price suggests.
Darts, but automated, so nobody has to do the arithmetic that historically ended darts nights early.
It is worth being clear that this is not a pub with a board in the corner. It is a properly designed room that happens to be organised around throwing, with food and a booking system and a photograph of your team at the end that you will look at once. The reason it spread across the country is that it works on people who have never played.
Crazy golf built out of scrap: bumper cars, bathtubs, and whatever else was available.
It is loud, it is sticky, and it is not trying to be anything else. Go with people who will find a hole made from a washing machine funny, because with the wrong company this is a long ninety minutes.
Grown-up fairground games in a slick indoor space, which sounds like a corporate away day and is much better than that.
The clever bit is the scoring. Everything is tracked across the whole venue, so you move between games with a running total rather than restarting your dignity each time. Canary Wharf means you can arrive from the station without going outside at all, which on this website counts for a great deal.
Ping pong, street food and cocktails, two minutes from Farringdon.
Table tennis is the great leveller of this entire category. Everyone has played it, nobody is good at it, and the gap between the best and worst person in your group is smaller than it will be at darts. If one of your party is competitive in a way that makes evenings worse, this is the one to book.
Racing simulators, done properly, with a bar in the middle of them.
Fifteen minutes in one of these seats will tell you something slightly humbling about how good actual drivers are. It is also the rare venue on this list where being terrible is genuinely entertaining for everyone else, since the leaderboard is public and merciless.
Batting nets with food and drinks, and it is fun even if you are hopeless, which the venue's own description says out loud and is right about.
Cricket is a strange thing to do indoors in a city that mostly ignores it for nine months of the year. It works because the bowling machine does not care about your technique and the bar does not care about your average.
Virtual clay pigeon shooting and cocktails, reached through an indoor mall, which is about as dry as an evening in London gets.
Shooting at simulated birds in a bar in Canary Wharf should feel ridiculous, and it does, for roughly four minutes. Then somebody hits a run of five and the whole group goes quiet and competitive and you lose an hour.
Indoor axe throwing, with someone teaching you, which is more satisfying than the phrase suggests and considerably safer.
The instruction is the point. Left alone with an axe you would throw it badly for an hour and go home. Twenty minutes of coaching and most people can stick it in the board reliably, and hitting a target with an axe turns out to be a very old and very simple pleasure.
Whistle Punks Urban Axe Throwing
Fifty-five pounds, and a genuine recreation of the television show, in central London.
This is the only one on the list where you should think carefully about who you bring. It rewards a group of five or six who are prepared to commit, and punishes anyone who has come along to watch. Book it for people you already know are enthusiastic.
The Crystal Maze LIVE Experience London
All of these are fully indoors, all of them are bookable, and all of them solve the specific problem of a Saturday that has rained since ten in the morning.
There are another thirty or so on the site if none of these fit. Somewhere with a scoreboard has the full list, sorted so the best ones are at the top.