Room Escape Artist

King of the Bootleggers is one of the best escape rooms in Toronto, Canada. Here are our recommendations for great escape rooms in the Toronto area.

Fly Me To The Moonshine

Location: Toronto, Canada

Date Played: July 6, 2026

Team Size: Up to 15 players; we recommend 9-12

Duration: 60 minutes

Price: $46.35 CAD per player on weekdays, $58.71 CAD per player on weekends

Ticketing: Public

Accessibility Consideration: All players must climb stairs

Emergency Exit Rating: [A+] No Lock

Physical Restraints: [A+] No Physical Restraints

REA Reaction

I waltzed out of King of the Bootleggers with three optimistic reminders:

1. Great gameplay is timeless, especially when all props are well maintained.
2. Public booking games can be positive experiences when meaningfully designed around larger teams.
3. Talented in-room actors can elevate an experience and smooth over any rough edges.

Especially for escape room enthusiasts, the prospect of getting randomly paired with strangers may be a turnoff… yet I was truly impressed by the ways in which Secret City designed this booking model into the core of their experience, rather than as an afterthought. At Casa Loma, public booking supports larger format games with multiple professional actors.

It’s not a money grab; it’s a more sustainable business model.

After an engaging opening scene with three colorful characters, King of the Bootleggers split our large team up across three different mini escape rooms, each with a bounty of parallelizable puzzles feeding into a thematic meta-objective. A different actor presided over each space, offering hints when needed and otherwise showing off impressive improv chops without ever crowding our flow. Because you’re in one of three possible spaces for most of the game, King of the Bootleggers could be replayable on a different track, apart from the final puzzle sequence, as long as you don’t spoil your teammates on the puzzles in the other rooms.

The gameplay in King of the Bootleggers featured creative takes on classic puzzle formats, including a few that I’d never seen adapted to an escape room before. These puzzles were tactile without being tedious, ensuring that there was always plenty to touch and discover for all players. Despite being constantly handled by hundreds of hands, all the props we encountered were impressively well maintained. The experience, both in style and substance, barely showed its age, a testament to consistent maintenance and thoughtful updates.

Secret City’s secret formula combines escape rooms with immersive theater, and King of the Bootleggers showcased the best of both realms. It was a satisfying puzzle-centric game which also featured top-notch acting. It’s the sort of game that will engage both brand new escape room players and seasoned enthusiasts alike.

Who is this for?

• Puzzle lovers
• Any experience level
• Players who don’t need to be a part of every puzzle

Why play?

• A bounty of satisfying puzzles
• Fun actor interactions
• An elegant historical venue

Story

At the height of 1920s Prohibition, we received an invitation to a secret meeting at the bar of gangster Rocco Perri. Everyone needed something, yet nothing was quite as it seemed.

Setting

King of the Bootleggers took place across multiple rooms and floors of an old historical building. The space was decorated with a variety of period-appropriate furnishings – bookshelves, a poker table, a suit of armor, a cocktail bar, and such.

Gameplay

Secret City’s King of the Bootleggers was a standard escape room in a large-scale setting with a moderate level of difficulty.

Core gameplay revolved around searching, observing, making connections, and solving puzzles.

Analysis

➕ King of the Bootleggers took place in a stylish historical setting that was perfectly appropriate for the Prohibition theming.

➕ As the gameplay was divided across three different spaces, there were also three actors to oversee each scene. All the actors were phenomenal in portraying clear and compelling characters, with a funny, tightly written script and entertaining cross-character interactions. An in-room actor in an escape room has the potential to be awkward or obtrusive, but all the characters in King of the Bootleggers fit perfectly into the space and were delightfully interactive, intervening only when needed. Hints were thus an entertaining feature, with a smooth approach to adaptive difficulty.

➕ A wide variety of puzzles were consistently fun, requiring constant manipulation of objects and layered, satisfying ahas. This style of gameplay was parallelizable, collaborative, and process-oriented, while managing to never feel like just busywork. While puzzle quality and difficulty were well balanced across the three spaces, I personally found that the library (moonshine room) had the most interesting gameplay for more experienced puzzlers.

➕/❓ Since we spent the majority of the experience in just one of the three sub-rooms, King of the Bootleggers felt somewhat closer to a small-team experience than the other Casa Loma escape rooms, in which there are also many puzzles to solve in parallel but usually in a single shared space for the full team. That said, this may also mean that you won’t see some of your teammates for much of King of the Bootleggers.

➖ King of the Bootleggers included a lot of searching for small components, which then fed into interesting puzzles. While this is a positive feature for larger teams or newer players looking for a meaningful way to contribute, it became a bottleneck for smaller, more puzzle-centric teams. We appreciated the actors’ guidance in ensuring we never got stuck for too long, but I also question whether some of this more tedious gameplay might adapted to team size.

❓ Compared to the other Casa Loma escape rooms, King of the Bootleggers had a particularly large amount of content that genuinely could not be solved by just a small team, regardless of experience. Even at its max capacity of 15 players, you’d be divided across the three rooms on five-player teams, with parallel puzzling in each room. For smaller teams, all three rooms may not be open at first… but if you finish your initial room fast enough, you may have time to visit a second.

➕ After spending most of the game apart, all sub-teams reunited for a thematic metapuzzle and a frenzied collaborative finale that united each team’s findings and took full advantage of the space and the actors’ strengths.

Tips For Visiting

• Arrive promptly 15 minutes before your game’s start time. Since Casa Loma’s escape rooms are public booking, they begin exactly on time.
• If you booked as a smaller group (less than 6 players) it is likely that the actors will keep you all together when they divide the larger team, though it depends on the overall group size.

Book your hour with Secret City’s King of the Bootleggers, and tell them that the Room Escape Artist sent you.

Disclosure: Secret City comped our tickets for this game.