"I Thought It Was Just Another Play Centre" — How EKPE Activate Games

Sarah Mitchell had tried pretty much every weekend activity Brisbane had to offer. Trampoline parks, movie nights, shopping centre play areas, backyard barbecues with the neighbours �" you name it, the Mitchell family had done it. And every single time, by Sunday afternoon, the kids were back on their screens and Sarah was quietly wondering why family time always seemed to fizzle out so quickly.

It was her friend Jess who finally suggested EKPE Activate Games in Chermside.

"Honestly I wasn't that excited about it," Sarah laughs now. "Jess kept saying it was different but I'd heard that before. I figured we'd go, the kids would be mildly entertained for an hour, and we'd be back home by lunch."

She was wrong. Spectacularly, wonderfully wrong.

The moment her kids eight year old Lily and eleven year old Tom walked through the doors at Level 1 on Gympie Road, something shifted. Sarah watched Tom's eyes go wide as he took in the Super Grid for the first time. She watched Lily immediately drag her towards the Laser Maze without even asking. And then something happened that genuinely surprised her.

Her husband Dave �" who had come along purely out of parental obligation and had spent the entire drive to Chermside suggesting they could have just watched a movie at home disappeared into the Hyper Hoops room and didn't come out for forty minutes.

"He was competing against Tom on the leaderboard," Sarah says, still laughing at the memory. "Absolutely refusing to accept that an eleven year old had better reflexes than him. It was honestly the funniest thing I'd seen in months."

What struck Sarah most wasn't just that the kids were having fun it was the kind of fun they were having. Active. Engaged. Genuinely present in a way that screens never quite managed to produce.

"Lily was running, jumping, thinking, reacting. Tom was strategising, competing, trying different approaches. Neither of them looked at their phones once for nearly three hours. As a parent that almost felt like a miracle!"

By the time they finally left slightly reluctantly, it has to be said something else happened that sealed EKPE's place in the Mitchell family calendar permanently.

Tom turned to Sarah in the car park and said completely unprompted: "Mum can we have my birthday party here?"

Three weeks later they did exactly that. The kids birthday parties Brisbane families keep talking about aren't an exaggeration Tom's birthday at EKPE became the most talked-about party in his friendship group for weeks afterward. Twelve kids, six challenge rooms, one very competitive leaderboard, and a dad who still insists he let Tom win at Hyper Hoops.

Nobody believes him.

The Mitchell family now visits EKPE most weekends. Saturday mornings have quietly become their favourite family ritual  the drive to Chermside, the familiar buzz of excitement as they walk in, the friendly faces from the EKPE team who've started to recognise them.

"It sounds dramatic but it genuinely changed how we spend time together as a family," Sarah says. "We talk more, we laugh more, we're actually doing something together rather than just being in the same room on separate devices."

She pauses and smiles.

"Also Dave finally beat Tom on the leaderboard last weekend. He hasn't stopped talking about it. So there's that."

Reviews

[lauren]

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