Maze Generator: Printable PDF

Three kinds of maze, and they solve differently

A perfect maze has exactly one route from start to finish and no loops anywhere in it. Every wrong turn is a dead end, which means the classic keep-your-hand-on-one-wall trick will always get you out. This is what most people picture.

A braided maze has had some of its dead ends opened, so the grid contains loops. Wall-following stops working. The solver can circle back to a junction they have already visited without realising it, and that is a harder and more disorientating puzzle even at the same grid size.

Rooms carves open chambers into the grid before the corridors are cut, which produces a different-looking sheet: pockets of open space joined by narrow passages, closer to a dungeon map than a hedge maze.

The difficulty ladder, ages three to adult

Difficulty is not one control. It comes from grid size and the difficulty setting working together, with line thickness deciding whether a small child can physically see the corridor. These five combinations each used to have their own page and are now presets here:

• Ages 3 to 5. 10×10, easy, thick lines. Corridors wide enough for a crayon, which is the actual constraint at this age.
• Ages 6 to 8. 15×15, easy, medium lines.
• Ages 8 to 10. 20×20, medium difficulty, medium lines.
• Ages 10 to 12. 25×25, hard, thin lines.
• Adults. 30×30, hard, thin. A long solve, and the one to print when you want twenty minutes of quiet.

There is a sixth worth knowing: braided at 25×25 gives a maze with more than one way through, which is a better race between two children than a single-path maze, because neither can simply copy the other's route.

All of those presets have ready-made PDFs in the gallery below if you would rather print a graded set than generate one.

Thickness, placement, and the seed

Line thickness runs thin, medium, thick. Thick is not only for young children: it is also what you want if the sheet is going through an old photocopier or being read by anyone whose eyesight is not what it was.

Start and finish sit in opposite corners by default. Switch to random and they land anywhere on the edges, which sometimes produces a very short solve and sometimes a brutal one. Corners are the safer choice for a class set.

The seed accepts a number or a word. Leave it blank for something new every time; type something in and that exact maze comes back whenever you want it, which is how you reprint a favourite that went missing.

Thirty mazes for a Friday

Medium difficulty, grid size 20, perfect type, medium lines. Seed left blank. Press generate thirty times, numbering the files as you save them.

Tick the solution box on one of those generations to keep a master answer sheet. On the day, every child has a different maze, which cuts the comparing and the copying down to nothing, and the teacher can check finished work against a single page.

How the grid is actually carved

A depth-first recursive backtracker, run over a grid that starts as solid walls. It carves until every cell has been visited exactly once, which is what guarantees the single solution in a perfect maze.

Braided mazes get a second pass afterwards that knocks out some dead-end walls to create the loops. Room layouts carve their chambers first and then run the main algorithm around them. The solution path is found with a breadth-first search, so the line drawn on the overlay is genuinely the shortest route and not merely a route.

Where it stops

• Above about 50×50 the walls get too thin to read once printed. Test one before you run off thirty.
• Braided does not promise multiple solutions. It promises loops. Whether those loops create a genuinely alternative route depends on where the start and finish landed.
• Room chambers are fixed rectangles. You cannot place them or shape them yourself.
• The solution prints as one continuous line, with no numbered waypoints along it.
• No colour fills, no shading, no themed artwork inside the maze. Print at full scale rather than shrink-to-fit, or the narrow passages close up.