The day started with me getting a picture of myself taken at Budapest’s Great Market Hall for a scavenger hunt for one of the puzzles—in appropriately Manic Sages-y attire, of course:

(Plan one was to stand outside the Hungarian National Gallery, but that had to be abandoned when it started snowing—at least, the closest we’ve gotten to real snow this year; it still didn’t stick.)

Of course, following Manic Sages tradition, we backsolved the scavenger hunt answer (solved a puzzle that was supposed to need the answer we’d be told for finishing the scavenger hunt, and used that puzzle to deduce what the scavenger hunt’s answer must have been), so the picture didn’t end up getting used.

The rest of the day consisted of working on puzzles—mostly of arriving at a puzzle to find it either completely stuck (and not unstuck by me) or moving so fast that any contributions I tried to make would be obsolete soon—Manic Sages makes things very easy for remote solvers, but it’s huge enough that that happens. Fortunately, I had fun finishing a few already-solved but not finished puzzles that had been abandoned, and contributed important progress to about two more.

Alas, it looks like this is the last day of the hunt, which is finishing much too soon. Mystery Hunts are supposed to go at least another full day or so.