Rooms and Doors Maze

Rooms and doorways, not corridors

The page is divided into rectangles by repeatedly splitting it, and every wall between two rooms gets exactly one door punched through it. You start at a door on the outside and work through the building to the exit.

It looks like a floor plan, which is the point — a solver reads it as a building rather than as a puzzle, and that changes how they approach it.

Why it solves differently from a grid maze

In a square maze the decision points are everywhere and the corridors are all the same width. Here the rooms are different sizes and the doors are in different places, so the page has landmarks.

That makes it easier to hold in your head and harder to search systematically. Solvers navigate by recognising rooms — "back through the long thin one" — rather than by tracking a corridor, and the mistakes they make are different: not dead ends so much as walking through the same room twice without noticing.

Because every pair of adjacent rooms is joined by exactly one door, the connections form a tree. There is precisely one route between any two rooms, no loops, and no room is walled off.

Room count

Six to forty, with the island offering 8, 12, 16, 24 and 32.

At eight rooms the whole plan is visible at a glance and a five-year-old can do it. At thirty-two the rooms are small, the doors are close together, and the solve is a proper search — and the drawing starts looking convincingly like an office floor.

Sixteen is the default and suits most people.

Where it earns its place

It is the maze that does not look like a maze, which matters for a child who has decided they are bored of them.

It also connects to something real. Ask a class to compare it with a plan of the school, or to mark a fire route through it, and the puzzle turns into a lesson about reading a floor plan — which is a genuinely useful skill and almost never taught directly.

For drawing their own, the floor plan grid gives squared paper set up for it.

What is under your control

Room count, the solution page (off by default here), a seed, and A4 or US Letter.

Solutions default to off because these get printed in stacks for parties and quiet time, where an answer page stapled behind is a spoiler.

Print at 100%.