The Vault of Bay Street

October 1928. The Dominion Merchants' Bank has closed for the weekend and a disgruntled clerk has sold you the floor plan. Sixty minutes until the watchman comes back down.

It is a Friday in October 1928 and the Dominion Merchants' Bank on Bay Street has just locked its brass doors for the weekend. A clerk who was passed over for promotion one time too many has sold your crew the floor plan, the combination to the staff corridor and one useful fact: the night watchman walks the vault level every sixty minutes, and he has just gone upstairs.

You start in the tellers' cage, surrounded by adding machines, a rotary telephone that occasionally rings, and a ledger that does not add up. The bank's manager was hiding something from his own directors, and the trail runs from the deposit slips through the manager's office to the vault door itself, a 1.2-tonne prop that our set builder cast from a real 1920s pattern. Behind it is the safe-deposit room, and behind that, the thing everyone in the story actually wants.

This is a code-breaking room more than a search-and-find room. Expect to work with substitution ciphers, dates, ledger totals and a rotary combination that takes two people to turn. Puzzles are mostly linear, so a pair can play it comfortably; teams of five or six should split into a 'front office' group and a 'vault' group once the corridor opens.

The Vault runs at difficulty four of five. About 44% of teams get out, and the record stands at 38 minutes 12 seconds, set by three accountants from a firm on King Street who asked us not to print their names. Most teams use all three included hints. If you have never done an escape room before, we would gently point you to Orbital Station Aurora or Lab 44 first, then come back for this one.

What to expect inside

Period props: adding machines, wax-sealed envelopes, a working rotary dial, brass keys
Two secret doors and one optional crawl space
Cipher wheels and ledger arithmetic; a pencil and paper are provided
A soundtrack of street noise and a ticking clock; no jump scares
Ideal team: 2 to 4 people who like thinking in silence, then arguing

Good to know

The Vault is the darkest of our rooms, so bring glasses if you need them for small print; a lamp and a magnifier are on the manager's desk. The optional crawl space is 30 cm high and 1.2 m long, and there is a hinged panel beside it for anyone who would rather walk. If your group is exactly two, tell the desk and we will set the combination dial to its single-player mode.