My 2023 Website Outlook

In 2022 I switched from daily mazes to weekly mazes and really preferred this schedule. This allowed me to put more work into each maze and create mazes that were more like artwork. Each Monday I launched a new maze with a blog post.

For 2023 this format will continue - a new maze each Monday launched with a blog post. I will also be makig weekly videos.

What type of mazes will I see on the site ?

• Building Mazes - a nice subject to create a maze with, & my favorite

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

• Scene Mazes - new. you’ll understand when you see it. Update - like this walking Street.

• and a few new one off experimental subjects to keep things interesting !

What will be new ?

• YouTube Videos - I will show some of the mazes being made in steps, edited into short videos. This will also include videos of mazes being solved. You can check out my channel here.

• New Shapes - I have already made a few mazes that are very wide and a square shaped maze. Expect more interesting shapes in 2023. I have found that if I make a make that is of a subject with a weird shape, I shouldn’t try to fit that maze to a standard sheet of paper. If I do I end up with a maze with a lot of white space or with a maze too small to solve. The maze size is the maze size regardless of the paper. Deal with it.

• Multi Maze Pictures - I have already made 2 mazes that include multiple mazes within them. One has 10, the other has 4 !! For what is coming in the future, these are subjects where some zones are impassable so multi-maze makes a lor of sense. Also, very large mazes where multiple mazes will fit. Check out this example of a famous building maze.

• More International Mazes - 44 mazes from 2022 were from the USA with only 4 other countries represented. There will be many more International mazes !

How can I suggest a maze subject ?

• Suggest a Maze subject. Please do !! I love when I get suggestions.

Let’s have a great 2023 !

My 2022 Year in Review

This is my year end review for the website to reflect on what I accomplished for the year. In the past, I made a lot of mazes, but this year I focused on making less mazes and each being of higher quality. I do this post each year and I keep the previous years data.…so 4 years of progress !!

Weekly (Daily) Mazes posted:

54 in 2022 vs. 640 in 2021 vs. 366 in 2020 vs. 365 in 2019

This was the big change for the website. Daily Mazes became weekly mazes. I did one each week, with a few weeks containing variations. Basically a few more than 52. For a detailed breakdown of my mazes of the week see the bottom section fo this post !

Blog Posts:

132 vs. 291 vs. 102 vs. 26

I cut back on the number of posts. Each weekly maze has it’s own blog post, and I still do maze movie reviews. I also spent some quality time updating any post from previous years that still had a high amount of traffic.

Name Mazes Made

13 vs. 4 vs. 247 vs. 1,499

This was one of my first projects. You can read about how I chose the names if you are interested. So 2022 and 2021 meant only doing requests when they were submitted, and not many were. Maybe it is because I have covered all the important names already ?

Books posted online:

2 vs. 12 vs. 8 vs. 19

In my first 3 years of the site I created a lot of free downloadable content. By my count that was 39 books, some of which have been retired or improved. When you make hundreds of mazes a year this makes sense. This year - not so much, just a few Christmas books I had never published before.

Books Published on Amazon:

0 vs. 0 vs. 3 (13 versions) vs. 0

I published my first 3 books on Amazon. I have 3 additional books sitting on the shelf, ready for publication if I come up with a marketing plan.

Website Traffic growth:

+47% vs LY, 2021: 242% vs LY, +1000%+ the PY

Hoping for even more growth in 2023 ! Each year growth gets a bit smaller as I grow the site.

Different countries visiting the site:

100 vs. 100 vs. 99 vs. 20

I think that the countries are actually higher than 100, but the analytics dashboard stops there ? Largest growth came from Jamaica, Chile, Lithuania, Saudi Arabia and Hungary.

Requests for Maze use:

About the same to slightly higher

YouTube Videos Created and watched:

Zero created, but views were up to LY by about 50%.

YouTube Subscribers:

Up. 2X LY technically.

RSS Subscribers to the blog:

Fluctuates during the year. Currently flat to LY.

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 !!

2022 Maze of the year voting results (thank you to all who voted):

And now the top 5 mazes of 2022 as voted on by you! Of course we had a tie at #5 so 6…let’s get to it !

• Maze of the year #5 (Tie) Sydney Opera House

• Maze of the year #5 (Tie) Chich’en Itza Pyramid

• Maze of the year #4 The Louvre

• Maze of the year #3 Sit and Spin Laundromat Sign

• Maze of the year #2 Epcot Center Spaceship Earth

• Maze of the year #1 Rock n Roll Hall of Fame Museum

Some statistics about the 52 mazes of the week that I featured this year:

• It includes 19 sign mazes, 16 building mazes, 5 monument mazes, 4 landscape mazes, 4 sculpture mazes and 4 miscellaneous mazes.

• 44 were based on things in the USA, with only 4 other countries represented: France, Australia, Mexico and UAE.

• 11 were made in black and white, 12 in both color and black and white versions, and 29 in full color !

Here are the 52 weekly mazes in order (with links to their downloads):

1. Horseshoe Bend

2. Monument Valley

3. The University of Alaska Museum of the North

4. Holiday Bowl Sign - Sign Maze section

5. Sit and Spin Laundromat Sign - Sign Maze section

6. Blue Mustang Sculpture

7. Alabama Theatre Sign - Sign Maze section

8. Abraham Lincoln Sculpture

9. Piet Mondrian tributes

10. The Alamo Mission

11. Agora Sign - Sign Maze section

12. Waterbury Clock Tower

13. Clayton Theatre

14. Rockford Tower

15. The Orange Shop Sign - Sign Maze section

16. Fox Theatre Sign - Sign Maze section

17. Tough Guy Lanes Sign - Sign Maze section

18. Miles the Monster Monument

19. Fresno Van Ness Avenue Sign

20. Cabana Inn Sign - Sign Maze section

21. Dolles Salt Water Taffy Sign - Sign Maze section

22. Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Arch

23. Wrigley Field Sign

24. Emo's Dairy Sign - Sign Maze section

25. National Center For Civil and Human Rights

26. Mesa Verde National Park Cliff Dwellings

27. Lincoln Memorial

28. Playhouse Square Sign - Sign Maze section

29. Thread City Sculpture

30. Grandview Hotel Sign - Sign Maze section

31. Ponce De Leon Lighthouse

32. The Louvre

33. First Baptist Sign - Sign Maze section

34. Bok Tower

35. Rock n Roll HOF

36. Key West Point Marker

37. New London Lighthouse

38. Hoover Dam

39. Epcot Center

40. Spillway Lanes Sign - Sign Maze section

41. Don Carter Lanes Sign - Sign Maze section

42. Sydney Opera House

43. Castle Craig

44. La Catrina

45. Air Force Cadet Chapel

46. Free Stamp Sculpture

47. Nampa Rollerdome Sign - Sign Maze section

48. Burj Al Arab

49. Chichen Itza Pyramid

50. Welcome to Las Vegas Sign - Sign Maze section

51. Christmas Tree

52. Large Snowflake

Un Libro Nuevo - Felices Fiestas - Una colección de laberintos navideños

¡Felices Fiestas! En 2021 publiqué laberintos diarios con temática navideña. ¡Había una gran variedad de diferentes tipos de laberintos y los he recopilado en un libro descargable gratuito! ¡Disfrutar!

¡Felices fiestas!

31 laberintos navideños recogidos en un libro. Incluye una variedad de tipos de laberintos.

File Size: 471 KB

Si estás buscando un buen regalo para los amantes de Maze, te sugiero que eches un vistazo a mis libros en Amazon (¡porque por supuesto que sí!)

The 5 Hardest Mazes on this Website - Part 1

I have made a few thousand mazes for this website, although only half of them remain because I got rid of the least popular ones. What is left are the mazes people seem to search for and download the most. If you stop by on Mondays you will see the new maze of the week which a more artful maze (usually) than the daily mazes I was making for my first few years tending the site. I think the extra days of design means a better maze.

Today I want to take you through the 5 Hardest Mazes on this site. All of these come from the earlier version of the site where daily mazes were the norm. By the end of this year I expect to have a Part 2 with complicated picture mazes, but for now here are the big 5:

#5 and #4 Playing Card Mazes

Specifically the King of Diamonds and Queen of Hearts playing cards. As of this writing each is featured on the home page, neither has a downloadable solution available, and both feature long dead ends. What do I mean by long dead ends ? Well I did not make the incorrect pathways obvious quickly for the solver. I also made multiple branches off of wrong pathways, so you might make a wrong turn, go back to the last intersection and go the other way just to realize later that is also the wrong pathway. Because of the level of detail each should be printed on large size paper to solve !!

King of Diamonds Maze

Queen of Hearts Maze

#3 Slide Arrow Maze(s)

The thing about a slide arrow maze is that if you make a large one with only one correct solution it can become impossible to solve without “backward solving”. In a slide arrow maze you can move to any other arrow the arrow you are on is pointing to (but no jumping gaps). So the number of possibilities gets large quickly and your chances of making the x# of moves in a row correctly are near zero. Any slide arrow maze would work here but I picked one where there are 13 possible second moves.

#2 Empire State Building Maze (at night)

First I want to mention that I made this in Microsoft Paint a pixel at a time before I discovered how to make digital mazes much more easily. It took months. The maze is based on a scale model I found online. Although it does not say so, there are 2 ways to solve the maze. From the start at the base to the top. Or go all the way up and then back down to the start. The maze has 2 pathways up/down. This is also my largest maze at 3 feet wide and 9.5 feet tall in full resolution. I did not make a solution file. The sheer size of this makes it difficult in addition to the fact it was an early maze of mine before I understood how to design an enjoyable maze soultion.

#1 Mega Arrow Maze

While this maze may or may not be the Largest Arrow Maze in the World, it is definitely difficult to solve. The thing that I like about Arrow mazes is that there are no dead ends, only incorrect loops that you can get caught in. Of course, that is also what makes them maddening when you choose the wrong pathway.

It has it’s own section on the site. And starting Tuesday I will be giving daily hints (5 in total) to help you solve it. Go there to get the directions on how to solve an arrow maze and the mazes download. Good Luck ! You will probably need it !

Hey, did you notice this is only Part 1 ? Well there are future collections of hard mazes coming. If you want to be notified when new collections of hard mazes are made send me your info below !