Welcome to the clickmazes collection! Online since 1997 offering an eclectic selection of puzzles and mazes all playable right here in your browser. Clickmazes is the original home of plank-puzzles, wriggle and boxup among many other curiosities of the route-finding genre.
New for October 2022: First up... a couple of notable new puzzlescript additions Hat-tricks and Football-with-friends. Next on the list is Erich's Full House puzzles now freshly transcribed to Kudamono. And last but not least, a complete overhaul of my old tile puzzles sub-page including the addition of the all new Space-station MMXXII.
Puzzle collection pages
PuzzleScript: Discover the power of puzzlescript.
Planks: Build your own route across across a perilous swamp.
Individual puzzle pages
Hat-tricks: Sokoban with hat-shaped portals. A magical mix.
Football-with-friends: Fancy footwork logic puzzles.
Switch-back: Mayhem with mixed-up mechanics.
X-marks-the-spot: Sneaky-Pete the pirate needs your help.
Number scramble: A wordsearch puzzle for the numerically gifted.
Punt mazes: Tricky little sokoban style puzzles.
Step-over sequence: Don't trip up in these step-wise mazes.
Toggle button: Solve the maze by toggle power alone.
ABRACADABRA: Why are magical words so difficult to spell?
XL-up maze: From I to XL, and then keep going.
Boxup: Inside-out Sokoban. Push the boxes from the inside only.
No-left-turn: Looks so easy until you realise you can't turn left.
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?
Colour-zone: Don't zone out in this variation on rolling-block.
Knight's tour: A peep-hole maze based on the knight's move in chess.
Full house: An Erich Friedman classic, of the 'fill-the-grid' genre.
NEWS and RULES: Mazes and puzzles based on simple grids of operators.
Puff-ball: Don't be blown away by this puffed up puzzle
Tile-puzzles: Tiny, meany jigsaws. Can you tie up all the loose ends.
Blackbox: Send rays of light into the blackbox and deduce the location of the hidden atoms.
Chain Reaction: Match colour or shape and clear the board.
Orientation: Tiny little 4x4 arrow mazes designed to disorientate.
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 can rise again, phoenix like, given a little time, self-belief and the right technology. 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 and rusty tools replaced. Might this turn out to be the best decade yet?
© Andrea Gilbert - 1997-2022