Maze Generator

What you get

One maze on one sheet of US Letter paper, with a Name and Date line at the top. On the square maze the way in is the top left corner and the way out the bottom right, each marked with a small solid arrow you can switch off. The solution prints on a second page unless you choose Puzzle only.

Every maze has exactly one route through and no loops, so a child who takes a wrong turn always meets a dead end rather than wandering in a circle. There are plenty to meet: a typical twelve square maze has about 16 dead ends and a twenty-six square maze about 70.

Mazes are drawn as lines rather than images, so they print sharp at any size and use very little ink.

Choosing a size

Easy is twelve squares across, 144 squares in all. Its route from the way in to the way out typically runs about 63 squares, though some run past 100, and the wide corridors suit a thick marker or a crayon.

Medium is eighteen squares across, and its route typically runs about 120 squares, nearly double the easy one. It is the size this maker opens on and the everyday choice for a class set.

Hard is twenty-six squares across, 676 squares in all, with a typical route of about 235 squares and some well over 400. The corridors are narrow enough that a sharp pencil works better than a crayon.

Difficulty only sets the starting size; every maze is carved the same way, so the bigger grid is what makes it harder. The stepper then moves one square at a time, from eight to thirty on the square maze, while shaped mazes start at twelve, sixteen, eighteen or twenty, depending on how much detail the outline has to keep. Past thirty the corridors on Letter paper get too narrow to draw a line in.

Ways to use them

Mazes are a genuinely useful pencil-control exercise. Staying inside the corridor without crossing a wall is fine motor practice, and unlike a handwriting sheet it does not feel like practice. For that purpose the easy size is better than the hard one, you want the child drawing steadily, not squeezing through gaps.

They also work as a quiet-time activity that needs no reading, which makes them useful for a mixed-age group or for a child who is not reading confidently yet. A maze asks nothing of vocabulary.

In a classroom they are worth keeping in the early-finisher folder for the same reason word searches are: no explaining and no grading. Print a few of each difficulty and let children pick their own level.

At home the shaped mazes suit the calendar: a heart, a shamrock, an egg, a fall leaf, a pumpkin, a ghost, a turkey, a Christmas tree, a snowman and a mitten. Each outline keeps only part of its grid, at twenty-six squares about 80 percent for a circle or pumpkin but only 30 percent for a star, so a shape makes a shorter maze than a square of the same size.

The maze is drawn on your machine

Every maze here is carved by code running in your own browser, at the moment you ask for one. Nothing is fetched from a library of pre-made files and nothing about what you chose is sent anywhere, which is why New maze gives you a genuinely different puzzle each time rather than the next one in line.

You can check that claim rather than take it. Load this page, disconnect from the internet, and keep generating mazes. They keep coming, because nothing had to be asked for.

Printing notes

Print at 100 percent rather than Fit to Page. Scaling a maze thins the walls and can make two corridors look joined when they are not.

Black and white loses nothing: in the PDF the walls and arrows are near-black and the solution route is gray, so a black and white printer shows both. The wall line also thins as the grid grows, so a thirty square maze does not print as a smudge.

If you are printing the harder sizes for young children, check one first. What looks fine on a screen can be tighter on paper than you expect.