The hardest maze pages full size#
The hardest maze pages download#
The hardest maze pages free#

You can click on any “node” and see its “successors” in a giant chain.įirst, you can select Room 1 and quickly trace a path from there to Room 26, to 30, 42, 4, 29, through the secret door to 17, then finally to Room 45. Having mapped the whole maze, yEd Graph Editor has a couple of useful features for quickly finding the shortest path. To me, this is a pretty clear hint that this is not a real door. However, this door is bricked up with a giant Jester’s hat over the top of. I’ve marked the hidden door from Room 29 to Room 17 with a red arrow in my map. This is beautifully concealed with a perspective trick, and signposted in several other ways. The unnumbered door in Room 17 is a secret entrance and only by finding it can you reach Room 45.Ĭarefully scouring every page reveals that there is a door numbered 17 hidden in Room 29. Room 17 has four doors but, on first glance there only three paths that lead in or out of it.

However, the second important clue is that the number of paths leading into or out of each room is equal to the number of doors, except in one case. At first glance, there is no way to get from Room 1 to Room 45. Mapping out the room was an interesting exercise and revealed a couple of important things. Play around with it and rearrange the rooms to your satisfaction! The source file, in graphml format, can be downloaded here (right click and save).

The hardest maze pages full size#

You can draw the whole maze out by hand, but you’ll soon have lines criss-crossing confusingly all over the place and its easy to miss some important features of the maze.Ĭlick on the image to open the full size version of the map.

The hardest maze pages free#

I chose to map out the entire book in a free program called yEd Graph Editor. Many of these clues are so frustratingly cryptic that I took a different approach. The Maze – click for full size versionOne way to find your way through the maze is to find the clues on each page that tell you which way to go next. The one-way doors mean that getting out of the maze once you’ve got to the centre is not simply a case of retracing your steps.

The shortest path through the maze takes 16 steps leading from Room 1, to the “centre” of the maze in Room 45, and back to Room 1. There is even one dead end with no way out at all and a blackly humourous ending to the story. Sometimes the story confirms that rooms with only one numbered door have only a single way out, for example. There are a few hints to this through the book. These un-numbered doors represent paths that lead into that room, but not out: the doors are one-way only. One trick to the Maze is that many of the doors do not have numbers on them. The story is more enigmatic than exciting or interesting and serves primarily to provide clues. By following the maze from room to room you get to choose your own adventure. Every page tells a different piece of a story of a group of people being led through the maze by a cruel guide. The idea is that you choose a door and turn to the appropriately numbered page in order to move around the maze. For me, the random contents and varied perspectives in each room are the draw rather than the artwork.Įach room has numbered doors leading out of it. The style will either be to your taste or not. Maze is a picture book and the maze is made up of 45 numbered rooms drawn in black-and-white hatching.

The hardest maze pages download#

You can also download an interactive map that keen Maze-solvers may find useful. This post takes a quick look at the book and provides the solution to finding the shortest path. Finally, the solution to the riddle is solved by finding clues hidden along the shortest path. Then there is a cryptic riddle to find at the centre of the maze. The first step is to find the shortest path in and out of the maze. The $10,000 prize money was instead split between several people who all got closest to the solution. True to the claim, nobody correctly solved it during the two years between publication in October 1985 and the close of the competition in September 1987. Maze by Christopher Manson is, according to the cover, “The World’s Most Challenging Puzzle”.