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Maze of the Week #103 is of Santa Klaus. Happy Holidays !
Would you like some Christmas mazes for kids ?
The Maze: Comic book style, free hand drawn walls. Santa has a stern look in his eyes. Have you seen the movie Violent Night ?
Santa Klaus Maze
I hope you enjoy the maze. Download is available on the homepage. Please check out my YouTube channel where you can watch this maze being made and solved!!
Coming next week:
Another holiday themed maze
I search out all kinds of maze games online. My personal favorite is the daily maze puzzle site was Pit Jump Mazes, which I wrote about before here. Unfortunately, it is no longer updated :(. If you are a fan of solving mazes on a screen using a virtual pen and featuring a variety of themes, I like Kidev, which features over 30 different themes, including train track mazes and pipe mazes.
Today I wanted to make you aware of a different kind of maze that uses a ball and gravity for difficulty. It is called Maze Control and you’ll need some strategy and understanding of physics to pass the levels. It all starts all easy (don’t they all)…and then at some point you get stuck…and for me that is when things get fun !
Maze Control logo
There are 30 levels. I have not completed them yet because I am stuck on one of them. As you move forward you get obstacles to avoid. Here is the 1st level and the 6th level for examples. Gameplay uses the left and right arrow keys to rotate the playing surface. The stars move and must be avoided on level 6.
If you like online maze puzzles, you should check this one out !
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I have written before that I would like to someday open a maze museum. I just need to find the right location - ideally one that already has mazes or labyrinths in their history, and is large enough to draw a nice crowd, but also not such a large city that it impossible to afford. Also, I need a few million dollars. Maybe more than a few. Ah, Dreams.
I love to review maze movies and one of the consistent themes are haunted houses. They are usually presented as mazes…but have you been to a haunted house with choice in direction ? (not many). Haunted houses are actually labyrinths. Another theme that has come up in maze movies are escape rooms. Those are puzzles, and some involve solving mazes. Anyway this got me thinking…..
The Full Building Maze
Imagine a maze that is located in a full sized building. Let’s talk about the size and the maze experience.
The building is large, possibly an entire small city block and 8 stories tall or similar.
You enter the building, and after paying take an elevator to the top floor.
When the doors open you step out of the elevator into a fully mazed floor.
Each floor has a different theme or difficulty - I am brainstorming here but here are some ideas
8th floor - maze walls are not completely to the ceiling, making it easier to get a perspective on the maze and see where you might want to go
7th floor - maze is more difficult - walls go the the ceiling. you can see down to the lower floor in the center and maybe yell down to help people stuck in….
6th floor - this floor is full of rooms with interconnecting doors, so you need to move room to room. Each room is themed. Have you ever heard of the famous Winchester Mystery house in San Jose ? Here is a floor plan of it to give you an idea !
Floor plan of the Winchester Mystery Mansion [image source: Pinterest]
o 5th floor - obstacle course - this floor is a labyrinth so no choices exist except for a first choice - do you want to take the easy or medium difficulty obstacle pathway
o 4th floor - glass and mirror walls on this floor to disorient you
o 3rd floor - in the dark - not 100% but very hard to see
o 2nd floor - clues and puzzles must be solved to move to the next room, similar to an escape room
o Ground - exit into a courtyard for refreshments and snacks
There are stairwells that go between floors - some even skip a floor ! Stairwells to nowhere !
The ground floor refreshments change to a bar at night after the kids are gone !
I would love some MC Escher themed spaces within the maze
I tried using a few AI image generators to make some images of what this might look like. They did not do a great job, but I did get these:
created with Craiyon
created with Craiyon
I am realistic. There is a shortage of housing and a building this big would cost a ton to outfit and maintain. This would lose a significant amount of money. How about one of the many empty office buildings that are empty now that we are working from home ?
I think this would be fun. I will make it if I become a trillionaire.
So as we come to the end of the year I start to reflect on what I accomplished with the site and where I am going into the future. One thing I have never done before is look back on what (new) blog posts from the year performed the best. In this post I will pull them together, partly as a record for me, and so you can explore any you may have missed along the way !
THE 10 BEST MAZE-MAKING DESIGN TEMPLATES TO GET YOU STARTED
I saw an opportunity to expand an earlier post I had written with new material and updates. This post gives you 20 free downloads of different templates that are halfway complete with instructions on how to complete them and make a maze ! 10 of those are holiday themed and great for kids !
AN EXPLORATION INTO AI IMAGE MAZE GENERATION
Post #1 in my series that kicked off how text to image generators did creating mazes. If you click on this post you can read how each website did until you get to my summary….
WHAT I LEARNED USING AI TO MAKE MAZE ART
No surprise that this post does well. Earlier in the year I experimented with a variety of AI text to image generators to see how they compared on making mazes. This is post #15 in the series which summarizes what I found.
THE 10 MOST FAMOUS LABYRINTHS FROM AROUND THE WORLD
Despite being a website dedicated to mazes and labyrinths I had never pulled together a list of famous labyrinths. The list is purposefully a bit quirky and contains places that most lists would not consider.
Part of the AI series I mentioned above, this is the most popular site that people want to read about. A bit of a spoiler, DeepAI is not very good at making mazes, especially compared to other sites.
EXPLORING DIFFERENT WAYS TO SOLVE A MAZE
I initially made a similar post where I just wanted to ask people (using a poll) how they liked to solve mazes. This took me down a rabbit hole of research where I learned about things like Trémaux's Algorithm and the Pledge Algorithm Method.
MAKING MAZES WITH AI: AI IMAGE GENERATOR
I am going straight to the spoiler - I would use this site for inspiration to make a maze, but not much more.
MAZE OF THE WEEK #54 - HEYDAR ALIYEV CENTER MAZE
It is not always the most famous buildings that do the most traffic to the site (but it usually is). Located in Baku, Azerbaijan I have gotten notes thanking me for making it from the country.
10 PLACES WHERE YOU CAN BUY SPECTACULAR MAZE ART
Exactly what it says. Some of the biggest art sites have maze art, and some are lacking. Find out who is who here.
THE SURPRISING BENEFITS OF SOLVING MAZES
Everyone wants to know if mazes are good for your brain. Yes, yes, they are as explained here.
BONUS: My Blog Index was created earlier this year and has been very popular, so if you did not find anything you like above, I have over 500 blog posts to choose from there !
