Maze of the Week #227 - Giant's Causeway

Maze of the Week #227 features the Giant's Causeway for the Causeway’s Coast in Northern Ireland. It is my first maze from Northern Ireland. The interesting looking natural wonder is made from 40K basalt columns, the result of volcanic activity a long time ago. Read about the location on Wikipedia.

Let’s see what National Geographic said about the location in this short video:

The maze: I went full color with shadows for this one. The shadows are important to give the illustration the right sense of shape.

Giant's Causeway Maze

Download is available on the home page. Happy Maze-ing !

Other blog posts you may enjoy:

The Largest Arrow Maze in the World - 5 Hints + the solution

If you have taken the challenge of trying to solve The Largest Arrow Maze in the World (probably) you understand why this post exists. It is a maze that takes a long time to solve, and because there are no dead ends in an arrow maze you can feel like you are looping back to previous points constantly. Sometimes you make the right decision, only to be looped even farther back in the maze when a new decision is incorrect.

But, I find Arrow mazes to be more fun than a normal maze. Why ? Well, you cannot see the dead ends easily. In a normal maze you can see obvious wrong pathways quickly and never take them. You can also see loops much more easily that are meant to confuse you, the solver. Arrow ‘pathways’, can change direction in ways that if drawn with regular pathways would need an additional level ( weaving pathways) so paths can go under and over one another. And finally, because of the use of double arrows, and warps (although none are used in this maze) you can get out of tight corners and spaces.

Here are 5 hints to help you solve The Largest Arrow Maze in the World (probably).

Hint #1 - The correct first move

The first move has 4 possible choices (actually 5, both moving to the right is a 1 move option since it returns you back to start). Here is the correct first move:

see the hint
 

Hint #2 - A checkpoint in section 1

Your initial goal is to get to the first of 3 checkpoints in the maze. Use this as an unmarked checkpoint before the first official checkpoint.

see hint #2
 

Hint #3 - A checkpoint in section 2

The move off the checkpoint only has 2 options, and one of them quickly becomes incorrect, so no hint is needed there. Instead you get another checkpoint between section 1 and the next official checkpoint.

see hint #3
 

Hint #4 - Correct direction from checkpoint 3

The all ways arrow that is your launching off point from checkpoint 2 has 8 options. Eventually you will find the right one, so no hints for that section (between checkpoints 2 and 3).

Checkpoint 3 only has 2 options. I think the wrong way options are fun…but if you are having trouble, this hint tells you which direction is correct.

see hint #4
 

Hint #5 - A checkpoint in the final section

The home stretch. Get to this spot and you are almost home ! This is your final solving hint !

see hint #5

If you do try this maze, time yourself and drop me a note how fast you were able to solve it in (and if you needed to use any hints) !

And when you are ready, here is the proof that the largest Arrow Maze does have a solution !

SEE THE maze SOLUTION

If you enjoy arrow mazes, the arrow maze sections of the website have been re-done and added to. Check them out (they just will be much easier than this one):

Arrow Mazes

Kids Arrow Mazes

I also expanded my Arrow maze books for sale on Amazon, with 4 books available. Each book contains 100 mazes. They make a great gift (and a unique because they can be done on Kindle devices).

If you just like large mazes, then these might be for you:

Largest Laser Maze - laser mazes are all about bouncing off walls !

Largest Pipe Maze - if you like weaving mazes !

Largest Mobile Maze - the longest maze on the website !

Or maybe you like hard mazes, in which case you want to check out the hard maze section of the site.

Did I miss anything ?

Weekly Hard Maze #17

Each Saturday I post a new hard maze with all of them sitting in the Hard Maze Archive. I will try to post a variety of maze types to keep things interesting.

Weekly Hard Maze #17 - On Line Maze

I made this on line maze from scratch. I made it look like a flag. Move from S to G on the line to solve the maze. Solution will be in the archive. Download is below.

download the on line maze

If you solved that maze quickly and want to try some of my archival hard mazes, these posts should do the trick:

One Maze - Many designs - experiment #16

This is a continuation of my maze design experiments. Read about it in post #1, One Maze - Many designs, and so on with a new post every Friday.

The original maze:

Simple Maze

I used Inkscape this week to play with walls, mostly expanding or reducing them to create a wall effect. Lets see what it looks like:

  • The first maze I expanded the walls with grey layers multiple times to create a mini wall effect.

  • The second maze I kept going from the first example above, basically even more of that

  • The third maze I did the reverse - a reduced the size of each layer slightly but stayed using only black walls.

  • The fourth maze I mixed, making the outer walls expanding each layer while the inner walls minimzed.

  • The fifth maze has a simple grey shadow. Nothing much.

I really like how the first half of these look. Because they all expand from a central point, they all look as if the center is lower than the outside walls. Not sure how I will use this, but it was fun to play with !