Welcome to the clickmazes collection! Online since 1997 offering an eclectic selection of puzzles and mazes all playable right here in your browser (no android or iOS account required, no downloads, no ads!). A traditional mouse and keyboard is all I recommend. So put that smart phone down right now, this is old-school. Clickmazes is the original home of plank-puzzles, wriggle and boxup amongst many other curiosities of the route-finding genre. Remember - you saw them here first, or your parents did anyway.
New for January 2021: First the brand new X-marks-the-spot puzzles, co-developed with Bob Henderson (USA). Mighty tricky puzzles and all on a 4x4 grid. Second a relaunch of the long-lost punt mazes re-implemented in puzzlescript by itch.io developer CHz. Just one sample in a heavenly bottomless chocolate-box of HTML5 brain-tickles. Discover lots more on the new puzzlescript collections page.
Puzzle collection pages
Introductory tour: A selection of novice-level puzzles for newcomers.
PuzzleScript: Discover the power of puzzlescript.
Individual puzzle pages
X-marks-the-spot: Sneaky-Pete the pirate needs your help.
Punt mazes: Tricky little sokoban style puzzles.
Number scramble: A wordsearch puzzle for the numerically gifted.
Toggle button: Solve the maze by toggle power alone.
ABRACADABRA: Why are magical words so difficult to spell?
HexaRoll: Tilt with a twist. Try not to get dizzy!
Boxup: Inside-out Sokoban. Push the boxes from the inside only.
Tile-puzzles: Tiny, meany jigsaws. Can you tie up all the loose ends.
Jump-by-number: Bunny-hop around the grid to find the goal.
Stepping-stones: As easy as a hop, skip and jump. Or maybe not.
Quantum: Can Schrödinger's cat solve mazes?
Step-over sequence: Don't trip up in these step-wise mazes.
Orientation: Tiny little 4x4 arrow mazes designed to disorientate.
Colour-zone: Don't zone out in this variation on rolling-block.
XL-up maze: From I to XL, and then keep going.
Full house: An Erich Friedman classic, of the 'fill-the-grid' genre.
Puff-ball: Don't be blown away by this puffed up puzzle
No-left-turn: Looks so easy until you realise you can't turn left.
Maze of life: Interactive game of life. Can you keep the blue cell alive?
Knight's tour: A peep-hole maze based on the knight's move in chess.
Chain Reaction: Match colour or shape and clear the board.
Blackbox: Send rays of light into the blackbox and deduce the location of the hidden atoms.
NEWS and RULES: Mazes and puzzles based on simple grids of operators.
Andrea - a potted history
As a child in the 70s I drew free-hand mazes, ever larger and ever more detailed, on 2D and then 3D surfaces. In the 80s I preferred form and structure, strong patterns that could be broken in small ways to produce elegant mazes. In the 90s I turned increasingly to rules and logic to add extra layers of complexity. More and more I lent on my own (and others) software engineering skills to help create, prove and solve my mazes. In the late 90s the web, and in particular java, finally provided me with the perfect tools to launch and share my ideas and opened up a whole new range of possibilities. The web-based, interactive puzzle-maze, or the clickmaze.
The noughties saw an explosion of creatively and new content, thanks in no small part to much encouragement and many great contributions from some world-class coding-wizards, puzzle-designers and computational-complexity boffins. This was the decade that made the NEWS and rewrote the RULES. It rocked, rolled, wriggled, pushed-the-box and walked-the-perilous-plank. Could anything spoil the fun?
Well, the tensies arrived. Support for java applets was waning fast, it was like staring at a black-hole at the end of a no-U-turn maze. And my audience was drawn away, by the dazzle of tablets and phones and downloadable puzzle apps. By 2014 my site was all but moth-balled. Was it CTRL-ALT-DEL for clickmazes? But an old puzzle-designer does not stop once she is proven PSPACE-complete and old applets do not die they just wait for the right transpiler. 2020 was a strong, bright light to aim for in my personal maze-of-life. Retirement and a reboot beckoned.
"Hello. IT. Have you tried switching it off and on again? " (IT Crowd - 2010)
So here we are in yet another decade.
Reboot complete, so what next?
You and I alike, will have to wait and see.
© Andrea Gilbert - 1997-2021