Printable maze guide
A maze gets harder for reasons that have nothing to do with its size.
Almost every maze tool sells difficulty as grid size: easy is small, hard is big. That is mostly a claim about how long the maze takes, not how hard it is. A big maze with long straight corridors is a walk. A small maze that turns at every chance is not. This page separates the two, so you can print a small hard maze or a large gentle one.
What you can make on this page
The builder produces maze packs of one to six mazes, in seven shapes, at six sizes and four difficulty levels, on A4 or US Letter, with one or two mazes to a page. Solution keys, a rules page, name and date fields, large print, and thinner ink-saving lines are all optional.
Nothing is uploaded and nothing is stored. The maze is generated in your own browser and the PDF is written on your own device, which is also why the New maze set button is instant.
The same grid, twice
Both of these are 12 squares across with the same number of squares in them. The only difference is how often the corridors turn and whether any dead ends have been opened into loops.
What the four difficulty levels actually do
The figures below are averages from 24 mazes generated at each level on the same 16 × 21rectangle, which holds 336 squares. They are measured at build time rather than estimated, so if the generator changes, this table changes with it.
| Level | Corridors | Route | Turns | Junctions on the route | Loops | Suits |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Easy | Long and straight | 75 squares | 16 | 4 | 0 | Ages 4 to 7, and anyone new to mazes |
| Medium | Turn regularly | 113 squares | 46 | 10 | 1 | Ages 7 to 10, and most classroom use |
| Hard | Twisty | 155 squares | 84 | 14 | 5 | Ages 10 and up |
| Expert | Very twisty | 196 squares | 120 | 20 | 8 | Adults who want to sit with it |
Read the junction column rather than the route column if you want to know how hard a maze feels. The route length tells you how long the pencil travels. The junction count tells you how many times the solver had to decide something, and deciding is the part that is actually the puzzle.
Why loops are the one that changes everything
A maze with no loops has a useful property: keep one hand on the wall and walk, and you will always reach the exit. Every wrong turn ends in a dead end that hands the wall back to you. It works on paper too, which is why a determined child can beat a large easy maze without ever really solving it.
Open some dead ends into loops and that stops being true. A wrong turn can now rejoin the maze somewhere else, the hand-on-wall trick can send you round in a circle, and you have to keep track of where you have already been. Easy and Medium mazes here have no loops or almost none. Expert has around 8 of them, and they are placed in wrong-turn territory rather than on the route, so they punish mistakes instead of offering short cuts.
Two named ways to get out of a maze
Hand on wall
Put your right hand on the wall and never take it off. In a maze whose walls are all joined together, this gets you out every time, though it walks you into and back out of every dead end on the way. The hedge maze at Hampton Court Palace, laid out around 1690, still yields to it: keep your right hand on the hedge and you will reach the centre, just not quickly.
Trémaux's rule
Mark every corridor as you walk it. Never enter a corridor already marked twice, and prefer an unmarked one. Turn back at a dead end, and turn back at a junction you have visited before if the way in was unmarked. Unlike hand-on-wall, this works on any maze, including ones full of loops, and it is the method worth teaching a child who has met their first Expert sheet.
Working backwards
Not an algorithm, just the most useful habit on a printed sheet. Start your pencil at the finish rather than the start. Mazes are usually generated outwards from somewhere, and the last stretch before the exit tends to have fewer branches feeding into it than the first stretch after the entrance.
Choosing a size, by who is solving it
| Solver | Recommended settings | Why |
|---|---|---|
| First mazes, ages 3 to 5 | Very small, Easy, large print, Start and Finish words off | Thick walls leave a wide channel to draw in, and arrows alone work before a child reads. |
| Ages 5 to 7 | Small, Easy or Medium, one per page | Long corridors let a child follow a line without lifting the pencil, which is the skill being built. |
| Ages 7 to 10, classroom | Medium, Medium, name and date on, two per page | Two to a page gives a fast finisher a second attempt without another sheet of paper. |
| Ages 10 and up | Large, Hard, solution keys on | Long twisting routes with real dead ends, and a key for when it stops being fun. |
| Adults | Extra large or Huge, Expert | Loops in the wrong-turn corridors mean you cannot prune by dead end alone. |
| Care homes and low vision | Small or Medium, Easy, large print, one per page | Fewer, wider corridors keep the sheet readable and finishable in one sitting. |
| Fine motor practice | Very small or Small, Easy, large print | The point is a steady controlled line, so the route should be short enough to complete in one go. |
Mazes as pencil control, honestly
Mazes turn up constantly in early years and occupational therapy material, and the reason is narrower than the claims usually made for them. A maze asks for a continuous line that stays inside a channel and changes direction on demand. That is close to what handwriting asks for, and it is more interesting than tracing.
What follows from that is practical: for this purpose, thicker walls and a shorter route beat a big impressive grid. Large print with the Very small size is the right sheet, not the Huge Expert one, and the child should finish it.
Large print is not only about eyesight
Large print thickens the walls, which widens the white channel between them. That helps someone with low vision, and it also helps a shaky hand, a thick felt-tip, a child still learning to stop at a line, and anyone working on a clipboard rather than a table.
Turning it on costs you nothing in difficulty. The maze is identical, only drawn heavier. If a sheet feels too easy with large print on, change the difficulty rather than the line weight.
The seven shapes, and what they cost you
Shapes are cut out of an ordinary square grid, which is why the corridors stay straight and the printing stays crisp. It also means the squares outside the outline are not part of the maze, so a shaped maze holds fewer squares than a rectangle set to the same size.
| Shape | Grid at Large | Squares used | Smallest grid it needs |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rectangle | 20 × 26 | 520 | 6 wide |
| Square | 20 × 20 | 400 | 6 wide |
| Circle | 20 × 20 | 316 | 10 wide |
| Heart | 20 × 20 | 262 | 14 wide |
| Star | 20 × 20 | 150 | 14 wide |
| Diamond | 20 × 20 | 220 | 10 wide |
| Triangle | 20 × 20 | 220 | 10 wide |
The practical reading of that table: a star at the Large size is roughly a third of the work of a rectangle at the Large size. If you are printing a mixed pack and want them to feel comparable, move the shaped mazes up a size or two.
Printing choices that matter
- One maze per page for anything above the Medium size. Two to a page is for small mazes and quick finishers.
- Ink-saving thins the walls rather than greying them, so it photocopies cleanly. It also narrows the drawing channel, so do not combine it with a sheet for young children.
- Print the solution keys separately if the pack is being handed out. They come after the mazes in the PDF, so the pages are easy to hold back.
- If you laminate a maze for repeat use with a wipe-clean pen, use large print. Standard walls disappear under a thick pen tip.
- Turn the Start and Finish words off for pre-readers and for anything that needs to work in more than one language. The arrows carry the meaning on their own.
Using a maze pack in a lesson
- Print the same maze at two difficulties rather than two different mazes, so nobody can tell who has the easier sheet.
- The name and date fields exist so a set can be collected and handed back. They are the difference between an activity and a piece of work.
- A six-maze pack at two per page is three sheets, which covers a wet break without a photocopier queue.
- Ask for the route to be drawn in pen after it has been found in pencil. It turns a finished maze into a second, more careful task.
- The rules page is worth including once for a group new to mazes, then never again.
How these mazes are made and checked
Each maze starts as a solid block of squares, and a carver walks through it knocking down walls, backing up whenever it runs out of new ground. That is the standard recursive backtracker, and the one change made to it here is a bias towards carrying straight on. High bias produces the long readable corridors of an Easy maze; almost no bias produces the tangle of an Expert one.
The entrance and the exit are then chosen rather than assumed. Easy and Medium put them on opposite edges and pick the exit that gives a route close to the length that level is aiming for. Hard and Expert search for the two edge squares that are furthest apart through the maze, which is a longer route than any fixed corner-to-corner rule would find.
Loops are added last, and only around the route, never through it. Adding them before the route is chosen quietly digs short cuts, and the first version of this engine had exactly that problem: the Expert setting was producing a shorter solution than Hard, because the loops it added were cutting corners off the answer.
Then the maze is solved. Not looked up, solved: the finished maze is searched from the entrance to the exit, and the route that search finds is what prints on the solution key. A maze that cannot be solved is discarded rather than printed. Five candidates are generated for every maze you ask for, and the one whose route length sits closest to the target for that difficulty is the one you get, because two mazes carved under identical rules can otherwise differ by a factor of three purely by luck.
How this page is made and reviewed
Print Puzzles is part of the Hamilton Digital Media Limited puzzle network. This page is written and reviewed by Brian Hamilton and Karan Hamilton. The maze engine was checked with a build-time harness that generated every shape at every size and difficulty and confirmed each one could be solved, that every step of the printed route passes through an opening rather than a wall, and that every square inside the outline is reachable. Read more about how we make puzzle packs, ortell us if a sheet prints wrong.
Printable maze FAQ
Do the printable mazes come with answers?
Yes. Leave Solution keys selected and the PDF adds a matching set of pages after the mazes, each showing the same maze with the route drawn from the entrance to the exit. The route is not stored alongside the maze, it is found by solving the maze after it is built, so the key cannot disagree with the puzzle.
What size maze suits a four-year-old?
Start at the Very small size on Easy, which produces an 8-square-wide grid with long straight corridors and a short route. Turn on Large print as well: it thickens the walls, which widens the space a child has to draw in. Most four-year-olds manage that comfortably, and you can move up a size once they stop needing to lift the pencil.
What actually makes one maze harder than another?
Three things, none of which is the size of the grid. How often the corridors turn, how far the exit is from the entrance, and whether any dead ends have been opened up into loops. On this page the Easy setting produces a route of about 75 squares with no loops at all, and the Expert setting produces about 196 squares with roughly 8 loops, on exactly the same grid.
Can I print a maze in a heart or star shape?
Yes. Seven shapes are available: rectangle, square, circle, heart, star, diamond, and triangle. The shape is cut out of an ordinary square grid, so every corridor is still a straight line and the sheet prints just as crisply as a plain rectangle. Heart and star need a 14-square grid or wider to keep their outline, and the builder says so if you pick something smaller.
Are these mazes free to use in a classroom or care home?
Yes, and there is no account or sign-up. Print as many copies as you need for a class, a group, a family, or a care home activity. The Terms of Use page sets out the detail, but the short version is that normal teaching, family, library, club, and care use is fine.
Why do some shapes make a smaller maze than others?
Because the shape is cut out of a square grid, so the squares outside the outline are not part of the maze. At the Large size a rectangle uses 520 squares while a star uses 150. That is not a fault, it is what makes the shape a shape, but it does mean a star maze solves faster than a rectangle at the same setting. Pick a size up if you want the same amount of work.
Is the maze in the browser the same one that prints?
The generator is the same, and so are the shapes, sizes, and difficulty settings. The maze in the play area is a separate one so you can try the settings without disturbing the worksheet you are building. Everything in the worksheet preview is exactly what the PDF and the browser print layout produce.