Make your own Mazes

You can trace mazes with your finger and work out the best ways of solving them - famous mazes - but that just saves you walking: the really puzzling mazes are the oldest ! They were really construction puzzles, built by following sets of rules to transform simple patterns into really complex ones. This was what people meant when they said that there was a trick to solving a maze - there was a trick to building them.

Solve the puzzles:

Build a puzzle maze

The oldest puzzle mazes are only 600 years old. They were designed on a grid of dots. In our version, you can easily design a maze out of just two kinds of wall-unit, and this is your chance to have a go and work out how it's done. You can also discover just how easy it is for maze designers to defeat solution by the "left-hand rule".

Make mazes by rearranging words and sentences

There is an acrostic labyrinth in St. Mary's Church yard in nearby Monmouth, where you can read "Here lies John Renie" in 46,000 different ways. Folk-lore has it that "by the time the devil's worked out who's there, the man'll be in heaven" ! These are the oldest mazes in which there is an obvious choice of path, and our computer takes all the hard work out of making them - but can you make a maze out of your name?

Build the Christian labyrinth, a construction puzzle

This maze was a symbol of the "one true path" which would lead to resurrection, and so it only had one possible solution. The oldest accessible Christian Labyrinth in Britain is on Mappa Mundi, one of the oldest maps of the world anywhere, which is in nearby Hereford Cathedral. Our version of the puzzle shows how building them involved a simple topological transformation which was invented a thousand years ago.

Work-out how Roman Mazes linked mazes together

Another pattern-making puzzle which we have simplified in the form of a sort of jigsaw - but how should it fit together? There are a dozen correct solutions to our version, although it looks as if there is only one choice of path! One of the oldest fragments of a Roman maze in Britain was dug up by grave-diggers in nearby Caerleon, where there was once a Legionnary fort. The town's museum was built to house it. Restorers were unable to believe that a maze could have only one path, so they put a dead-end into the design - which no Roman Maze ever had!

Solve the mystery of the Clue of Twine

The oldest type of maze was a geometric pattern-making puzzle with millions of possible solutions yet only one path! The earliest-dated example was doodled on a clay tablet in ancient Greece while someone waited for it to dry, but can you work out how to draw the patterns so that you choose which path you build? You can doodle them the sand-tray with your finger, or our computers will draw them for you from numbers you type.

Of course, drawing them is one thing, building them full size is another. Here you can you find out what a clue of twine really was, but can you work out how it was used?

There are other traditional puzzles to do, all symbolically related to mazes:

There's the Magic Square (with 8 solutions in our easy tile-puzzle version, but thousands more are possible), the Pythagorean Pentagram with its 264 solutions (but how many can you find?), the Farmer's Fylfot and more. They were all about choosing a path through life.