Make a printable maze

How to use it#

1. Pick a shape: a rectangle, a circle, a hexagon, a picture such as a heart or a cat, or letters you type.
2. Choose a difficulty and the kind of paths you want.
3. Press New maze until you like the one on screen.
4. Set how many mazes the PDF holds, add a title or a line for a name, and download it.

What makes a maze easy or hard#

Size matters most. Easy is a grid of 10 by 10 cells, about right for a five or six year old with a crayon, and Expert is 36 by 36, which takes an adult a few minutes. A bigger maze has more turns to choose from and more places to go wrong.

Where the way in and the way out sit matters too. On Easy and Medium they are in opposite corners, so a solver always knows which way to head. On Hard and Expert they are placed as far apart as the maze allows, which can mean two points on the same side, with the route wandering across the whole grid between them.

The kind of paths changes the feel more than the difficulty does. A maze of long winding corridors is easy to follow but long to finish; a maze full of short dead ends looks busy and fools the eye, though its solution is often shorter.

Choosing the kind of paths#

Long winding paths makes corridors that run a long way before they branch, so there are few dead ends and the route through is long. It suits young children, who can trace a path without backing out of many wrong turns.

Lots of short dead ends gives a maze where nearly every corridor splits. It looks harder than it is, and suits older children who like the hunt. A mix of both sits between the two, with no pattern of its own.

Custom names the method behind each: the recursive backtracker for long winding paths, Prim’s for short dead ends, and Wilson’s for the mix, plus Kruskal’s and hunt and kill. It also sets the exact number of rows and columns, and where the way in and out go.

Printing a worksheet pack#

Set Mazes in the PDF to the number you need, up to twenty, and each maze gets its own page. With Answer key at the back, the same mazes follow with the route drawn in red, so the pages to hand out come off the printer together and the answers stay with you.

The first maze in the pack is the one on screen, and the rest are new mazes with the same settings. A title prints at the top of every page, and the name line gives each child somewhere to write their name.

The PDF is drawn in vector lines, so it prints sharp at any size. Pages are Letter or A4 with half-inch margins, which every home and school printer can reach, and a maze much wider than it is tall, such as a short word, prints across a page turned on its side.

Custom sets the walls thin, regular, or bold; Simple draws them regular. Bold walls stay clear through a faint printer or a photocopy, and thin walls leave the widest path between them, which helps a small child steering a crayon.

Circles, hexagons, pictures, and words#

A circle maze, sometimes called a theta maze, starts at the rim and ends at a dot in the middle. Its rings split into more cells as they get further out, so the passages stay about the same width all the way in. A hexagon maze, or sigma maze, gives every cell six ways out instead of four, which makes it harder to see the route at a glance.

A picture maze fills a heart, a star, a Christmas tree, a cat, or another outline with paths. A word maze does the same with letters you type, in the heaviest font your device has. Letters that do not touch are joined by short corridors, and a dot too small to hold a path, such as the one over an i, is left out.

A word takes up to ten letters, so a child’s name fits. A long word is split over two lines when that prints its letters larger, at a space if there is one, so ten letters fill the page at about twice the height they would have on one line. The two lines meet only at their right-hand ends, so the solution reads along the top line and back along the bottom one. For more paths inside each letter, raise Letter height in Custom.