We had 12 months of voting to determine the best mazes each month and now we have voting to determine the best of the best here. The interesting thing is as new people discover and vote, mazes that came in 2nd or 3rd place one month might just come in 1st overall for the year ! new voters, new perspective.
Although some months had up to 8 best of mazes I thought I would take the time to look at the top 3 vote-getters from each month for the year. Those are the ones eligible for the final 2019 vote. Here is a snapshot of those mazes that I use on the voting page, but if you want to see full size, I made a section for the mazes
The Maze Subject
The most popular subject for winning mazes was animal mazes. with 8 placing out of 36 spots, including 4 monthly winners. If an animal maze is made well it tends to get a fair amount of voting support. Tied for most popular maze type is food/drink, also with 8 monthly spots, including a clean sweep of March. Food also had 2 monthly winners. The rest of the mazes have generally random categories, although there are 3 vehicles, 2 monetary, 2 clothing and 2 game mazes each.
The Maze Difficulty
My early daily mazes were definitely more difficult than later mazes I made. That is true for the mazes voted best of also. I would classify 19 of the mazes as medium difficulty, 12 as hard and only 6 as easy.
The Maze Type
A standard maze construction was used for 27 of the 36 mazes with no other construction being used more than twice. I use a standard construction for the majority of my mazes so this is not too much of a surprise. There were no escape mazes, or two way mazes, only mazes that started and ended on the border of the object. Only 1 maze, the Penguin maze did not start and end at the border of the picture.
The Maze Colors
The use of 4 colors or 2 colors for a maze were each used 9 times. Next in line was the use of 6 or more colors that was used 5 times. There were also 3 black and white mazes, so the majority, or 33 were color mazes. Overall the colorations are relatively muted colors in grays and browns, not many bright colors and some colors like purple, orange, and yellow are barely seen (and then only as accents).
The Picture Complexity
Here is where I think we have some consistency for the winners vs. non-winners, The mazes voted as the best of the month are generally more complex pictures, regardless of the maze inside. The Ace of Spades is probably the least complex structure but it is easily recognizable for what it is. Most everything else has some complexity to it.
In Summary
I don’t know if there are many conclusions from this other than people voted for pictures they liked that happen to contain mazes.
UPDATE : The votes were counted and here is where we landed:
NAVIGATING THE BEST MAZES OF 2019: THE VOTES ARE IN !
Other posts you may like:
2022 Maze of the Year Voting Results
