Difficulty is corridor width and dead ends
Easy mazes have wide corridors, few branches and a route that mostly heads towards the exit. A four or five year old can trace one with a finger. Medium adds dead ends that run for several turns before closing. Hard narrows the corridors and adds loops, which defeats the usual trick of keeping one hand on a wall.
Every maze is generated with a guaranteed single solution, so there is no chance of handing a child something unsolvable, which is a real risk with mazes drawn by hand.
Shaped mazes
The outer boundary is the Christmas shape, so the maze looks like a tree or a stocking rather than a rectangle with a picture next to it. Start and finish are placed at natural points, usually the base and the tip, which gives the puzzle an obvious direction.
Printed at A3 the hard versions become a reasonable adult puzzle, and the extra size makes the narrow corridors workable with a pen.
Using a maze with a group
Print two or four to a page for a party table. A maze is the one puzzle that works when children arrive at different times, because it takes two minutes and needs no explaining. Pair it with a dot to dot sheet and most children will do both.
Questions
- Is every Christmas maze solvable?
- Yes. Each one is generated with a single guaranteed route from start to finish, so there is no risk of handing out a maze with no solution.
- What shapes are the mazes?
- Six outlines: a Christmas tree, a star, a stocking, a bauble, a bell and a gingerbread man. The maze fills the shape rather than sitting in a square.
- Which difficulty suits a five year old?
- Easy. Wide corridors, few branches and a route that generally heads towards the exit, which a child can follow with a finger before using a pencil.
- Does the solution print too?
- Yes, on a separate sheet with the route marked, so you can check a child quickly without solving it yourself.