Hidden Message Maze challenge - Part 2

So you decided to come back for more of my hidden message challenge ! If you missed Part 1, I suggest you start there, but if you are back you know what to expect. I will show you 10 hidden message mazes. Try to figure out what it says by solving with your eyes (or any other method you want). When you are ready, scroll down and find the answer. Good Luck !

Hidden Message Maze 11

“Friday”. Not sure how I would use this maze. I think the word is well hidden.

Hidden Message Maze 12

I need to tell you I constructed this differently than other mazes as a test.

“Yes”. Looking back on this experiment, I would say this does not work the way I intended, If you missed this one, sorry, my bad.

Hidden Message Maze 13

I like this maze a lot. Tons of false letters and words. SEE YOU SOON is the answer and this would make a nice card for someone (especially someone you haven’t seen in a long time).

Hidden Message Maze 14

Bravo.

Hidden Message Maze 15

Dream.

Hidden Message Maze 16

Another maze where I packed the maze with letters and possible words

Hidden Message Maze 17

I tried to trick you on HELLO by placing it in a new place in the maze.

Hidden Message Maze 18

I made this to be used as a greeting card, Have a nice… and then you fill in the rest with your word of choice. Day, Wedding, Vacation, Trip, Weekend, Summer…you get the idea !

Hidden Message Maze 19

Surprise ! Are you ready for the final maze ?

Hidden Message Maze 20

Did you believe you could solve that one ? How did you do ? Ready for Part 3 ? Spanish ? Or do you want to try some maze mistake observations ?

If you enjoyed it there are a total of 2 more hidden message challenges for you to try:

Hidden Message Maze challenge - Part 1

Hidden Message Maze challenge - Part 3

For a higher degree of difficulty try these mensajes en Español !!!!!

Laberinto De Mensajes Ocultos

And if you are good at spotting things you might also enjoy a collection of my maze mistakes !

Hidden Message Maze challenge - Part 1

I take pride in my ability to make hidden message mazes. Some of them have well hidden words and some have words that can easily be spotted. How are you at solving mazes with your eyes ? If you think you are good at it, this is the challenge for you. The challenge is very simple in principal - I will show you a hidden message maze, and when you are ready with your guess scroll down for the answer to see if you got it right. This challenge has a total of 10 mazes, each with the answer after it.

It is also Part 1 of a 3 part series (plus a 4th Spanish language version if you want to try that - all links below!) Good Luck !

Let’s get started !

HIDDEN MAZE #1

Hmmmm. Do you have any idea what the answer is ?

I added the “It’s a” last minute…”It’s a boy”. A perfect maze to announce the birth of a child.

HIDDEN MAZE #2

“Miss you”. I could Have done a larger dump for “I Miss You” which is also an acceptable answer

HIDDEN MAZE #3

PARTY is the answer. This maze was made to be used as a party invite

HIDDEN MAZE #4

I used larger letters for this one, Thank You !.

HIDDEN MAZE #5

I spaced them out, but here we have It’s a Girl, of course solved in pink !

HIDDEN MAZE #6

I went back to big letters to mix things up a bit. Congrats if you solved this one correctly, I feel like the letters are well hidden !

HIDDEN MAZE #7

Our largest message so far, Happy Birthday !. Obviously I made this to make a greeting card. I think it would be fun to give someone for their birthday.

HIDDEN MAZE #8

A hidden hidden maze. I couldn’t resist making this one.

HIDDEN MAZE #9

I went back to back, this time with hidden “message”. I also tried to fake you out by putting the maze solution at the top of the page. Did I fake you out ?

HIDDEN MAZE #10

Maybe is the final answer. I tried to fake you out again with other words and placement of letters.

How did you do in this hidden message challenge ? 10 of 10 I’m sure !

If you enjoyed it there are a total of 2 more hidden message challenges for you to try:

Hidden Message Maze challenge - Part 2

Hidden Message Maze challenge - Part 3

For a higher degree of difficulty try these mensajes en Español !!!!!

Laberinto De Mensajes Ocultos

And if you are good at spotting things you might also enjoy a collection of my maze mistakes !

Codebox maze generator review

Today we have a new maze generator to review. I think you are going to like this one because it has so much more functionality than most I have seen online.

I will be using the same format I have used for my review of the top maze generators and am adding this review to the main blog post. If you are not familiar with that post I will look at what shapes of maze are available, the cell types, size, choices to start and end the maze, is the solution given and can you download it. Let’s get to the site review.

CODEBOX

Shapes: 4+ : Square, Circle, Triangular Grid, Hexagonal Grid. While there are 4 main types you can also create an infinite number of shapes using the mask feature !!

Cell types: 3: Square, Hexagons, Triangles

Width and Height: 2 - 50 for squares and hexagons, Triangles from 4-85 width to 2-50 height, and circles can have 30 layers

Start/end: 4 choices: None, Top to Bottom, Left to Right, Hardest entrance/exit

Solution generated: Yes

Downloads available: Yes, as an SVG file.

What this site does best: Of all the sites I reviewed this is one of only 2 sites with Circular maze generation. It is also the site with the most flexibility in creating shapes. You can create a distance map that shows how far the point is from the entrance. The generator offers a choice of 10 different algorithms to generate the maze. You can also solve these mazes on screen using your mouse and keyboard (Hit the PLAY button in the right menu). You can also choose to watch the maze generate (In the right panel choose SHOW ALGORITHM STEPS instead of Instant Mazes) !

Examples: Starting in the top left corner a simple 20x20 maze, a hexagonal grid maze, a circular maze, and a shape I made myself using the mask feature. I also suggest you check out the examples given on the site.

Finally here is a look at an example of a distance map. From the bottom entrance in green to the top exit in red (generally).

I couldn’t resist making a “do you” maze using the mask feature.

I spent some time playing with the mask feature and should note that you should adjust the size of the maze before creating the mask (and every other option for that matter). The default when I first played with masks was a 10x10 square - not much space to work with creatively. I adjusted this to 20x20 to give myself more room to work on the mask ! Here is a random shape I made using the mask feature - not sure what it is - but that’s a good thing - you have a lot of flexibility to work with !

This is an excellent website for generating mazes. When I first reviewed this website 2022 I really liked it. I’m not sure anything has changed since then, and to me that is a good thing ! This website works and I recommend it.

My 2021 Year in Review

I wanted to write a year end review for the website to reflect on what I accomplished for the year. Yes, I made a lot of mazes, but I did more than that, expanding what I did and how I did it. This post might just be for me, but I am happy to take you along on the journey. Enjoy. And since I did this exact post the year before…why not show 3 years !! I also added my outlook for 2022 as things will be changing !

Daily Mazes posted:

640 in 2021 vs. 366 in 2020 vs. 365 in 2019

I was up against a leap year from 2021 so I was destined to be at 365…until I decided on April 1st to create the Spanish Language section of the site (Laberintos) which added 275 additional mazes. Some of these had no changes but I am not going to count individual translations.

Blog Posts:

291 vs. 102 vs. 26

Some of my most popular content is still from 2020. In 2021 I tried some new things to improve my SEO and that included deleting large sections of the website and creating 100 blog posts, each featuring a best maze from 2018-2020. This did not work. But I did blog significantly more than LY and that did work, My goal was 3 times a week or 156 posts and even after dropping the 100 maze project I crushed that number.

Name Mazes Made

4 vs. 247 vs. 1,499

The SEO on this section of the site dropped off significantly this year. You can read about how I chose the names HERE. So 2021 meant only doing requests when they were submitted, and not many were, although this may become a project for 2022…maybe…

Books posted online:

12 vs. 8 vs. 19

In the 2 years prior to this one I created a lot of free downloadable content. By my count that was 27 books, some of which have been retired or improved. For 2021 while I started off with a few monthly books, I got away from this to focus on other content. Somehow I still managed to make 12 books !

Books Published on Amazon:

0 vs. 3 (13 versions) vs. 0

I published my first 3 books on Amazon. And with a bit of help I translated 2 of them into 3 additional languages. I also have one of the few Kindle maze books available since Arrow mazes are solved with your finger/eyes and not a writing utensil. My books did not sell very well so I have 3 additional books sitting on the shelf, ready for publication if I come up with a marketing plan.

Website Traffic growth:

242% vs LY, +1000%+ the PY

The website traffic grew year over year by 242% and it has the potential to grow by the same in the future as I learn more about image SEO. I am also looking at changing the future content of the site to attract different people.

Different countries visiting the site:

100 vs. 99 vs. 20

Well this was a weird category that I really wanted to grow in 2021…and I did technically grow it. But I lost 11 countries along the way (none with high traffic in 2020) while gaining 12 new countries. My largest new country was Barbados, followed by Guatemala. Thank you ! While I thought my largest growth would come from Spanish speaking countries (it did not), it was instead from Azerbaijan, Nigeria, Vietnam and Singapore.

Requests for Maze use:

About the same to slightly higher

YouTube Videos Created and watched:

Zero created, but views were up !

YouTube Subscribers:

Up.

RSS Subscribers to the blog:

Up +18. Has bounced around during the year…

Books Sold on Amazon:

Slightly down

So that is my year in review. I learned a lot. I hope to continue growing the site, making more books, and of course posting some interesting mazes !!

Now what can you expect on the site in 2022 ?

For the past 3+ years I have been posting daily mazes on this website. In 2018 and 2019 the theme was based on weird holidays. In 2020 and 2021 I featured a different type of maze each month and concluded most months with a free downloadable book. This gave me a guideline to design each daily maze and focus my work. In April of 2021 I started the Laberinto portion of the site for Spanish speakers.

For a typical 30 day month I need to do the following: 1 - Create a maze. 2 - Format and save the maze for display on the website. 3 - Create a downloadable file for the site. 4,5,6 - repeat steps 1,2, and 3 in Spanish by translating and updating each file. So each month I make 180 different files in order to populate the site. It takes a lot of time. Even for simple mazes. I work on other, more complicated mazes than the ones that I post daily. Those are the mazes I like making the most. The daily mazes are taking up a lot of time…but they do not produce a lot of enjoyment for me (typically). So they are stopping in 2022.

So what is going to happen in 2022 ? A weekly maze. 52 mazes for the year. Each maze will be more intricate. Each maze will be closer to what I call maze art. Each individual maze will have it’s own linkable section of the website for after the week is over. Each weekly maze will have a blog post telling you about the maze, possibly about how or why it was made and give more background. I also might include some additional coloring options for each maze. I like to think of it like a comic book, where each maze has an alternative cover !

I think you will see better mazes that are more shareable and more likely to be printed out and solved. Now, I will spend the same amount of time making mazes, but instead of producing 180 files for 30 days, I will make 12 files of 4 mazes for 28 days. And I will like a final product that has much higher quality (and I hope you will to!)

What type of mazes will I see on the site ?

• Sign Mazes - for some reason I like making this type of maze

• Building Mazes - a nice subject to create a maze with

• Landscape Mazes - I have not perfected these yet, but with some practice I think these could become interesting

• Landmark/Statue Mazes

When will mazes be posted ?

• Every Monday except for the first maze which will post on January 1.

• Each maze will also include a blog post to accompany it.

• Many mazes will be posted during specific weeks to honor a specific holiday / anniversary, etc. Some of my favorite mazes are already slated for September/October !!!

Now would be a good time to give you an example. Let’s start with a maze I have featured before as an example of ‘maze art’. The Playhouse Square Sign in Cleveland Ohio. Obviously, the example is smaller than when it prints on regular size paper and is solvable (and easier to see the maze!).

From across the room this looks like a picture and not a maze (hopefully). Only when you get up close do you realize that what you are looking at is actually a maze. That is my goal.

I hope you enjoy the new format ! Let’s have a great 2022 !