🕵️Quest #1 - The Lost Canvas 🎨

#### A Jan Steen Detective Hunt — Leiden, 21st June 2026

A lost painting. Eight fragments scattered across the city. Two and a half hours to put it back together.

Four hundred years ago, Jan Steen was born in a Leiden brewery. He grew up to paint the chaos of the everyday — drunks and dancers, broken eggs and overturned chairs, merry families, secrets hidden in plain sight. They called his style "a Jan Steen household": beautiful, riotous, real.

In honour of his 400th anniversary, we've concocted a city-wide mystery.
An unsigned canvas has surfaced — the experts say it could be his. But it has been broken into eight fragments, scattered across Leiden's old heart. To prove it's a real Steen, the canvas must be reassembled.

That's where you come in.

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#### 🔎 What you'll do

You'll join a team of four detectives. Across 2.5 hours, your team will visit 8 places in Leiden's historic centre — bridges and courtyards, monuments and hidden walls, a windmill and a fortress — each holding a clue.

Solve the riddle. Find the fragment. Move on.

Eight fragments. Eight letters. Together they will name the master.

But the hunt doesn't end at the eighth station. The final letter brings a final riddle — and only the team that solves it can find where the painter still lives, in spirit, in an alley of his own city.

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#### 🎨 Not your average scavenger hunt

• Speed doesn't win — detail does. The team that observes most carefully, creates most beautifully, plays most thoughtfully — that's the team that wins.
• No Wikipedia required. Every answer is in the world around you: on stones, in alleys, on the side of a windmill, beneath a statue. We promise.
• English-language and newcomer-friendly. Whether you've lived in Leiden for years or visited twice, the riddles are designed to be solved with eyes, ears, and a team that pays attention.
• The journey ends in a pub. Where else?

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#### 🍻 Prizes for everyone

Every team goes home with a themed prize package, hand-picked from the corners of Leiden you'll never find on a tourist map: a brewery, a centuries-old bakery, a museum shop, and a few other places we'll keep secret for now.

Nobody goes home empty-handed.

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#### 🗓️ Practical info

• 📅 When: Sunday, 21st June 2026 · 14:00
• 📍 Start: Pieterskerk square, by Kloksteeg
• 🎯 Finish: a Leiden pub (we'll find out where together)
• 💶 Cost: €10 per person — covers all materials, prizes for all teams, and the organising (payment upon RSVP for confirmation).
• 👥 Team size: 4 players for each team
• 🌐 Language: English

What to bring: a phone with WhatsApp or Telegram or Signal (essential!), comfortable walking shoes, weather-appropriate clothes, a sense of humour, and curiosity.

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#### 👀 Who's this for?

Anyone curious about Leiden — newcomers and old hands alike. Painters, poets, walkers, drinkers, history nerds, puzzle lovers, expats and locals, people who just want to wander an old city with strangers and end the afternoon in a pub.

Come solo, come with a friend, come with three — we'll mix you into teams on arrival.

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See you at the Pieterskerk.