Circular Maze Rules: How to Play (With a Printable Example)

The rules of a circular maze are simple: enter at the arrow, find the one path through the rings, and reach the dot in the middle. This page states every rule, shows a real easy maze made by the LogikLand generator with its solution, and describes the moves that confuse beginners.

What a circular maze is

A circular maze is built from rings around a center. Each ring is cut into cells. The walls are of two kinds: arcs, which are pieces of a circle, and spokes, which run along a radius. A passage between two cells exists where there is no wall between them. The center is a single cell, marked by a black dot. The outer ring is closed by a thicker circle, interrupted only at the entrance.

The cells get more numerous as the rings get wider, so the maze looks even from the middle to the edge. The easy level, for example, has rings of 1, 6, 12, 24, 24, 24, 48 and 48 cells, 187 in all.

The picture is always turned so that the entrance is at the top, whichever outer cell it opens on. The page that can open a LogikLand book of circular mazes says the same in three lines: enter at the arrow, follow the paths around the rings and between them without crossing a wall until you reach the dot, and remember that each maze has a single path. The solutions are at the end of the book.

The rules

1. Start at the arrow at the top of the circle. It marks the only opening in the outer wall.
2. Reach the black dot in the center.
3. Move from a cell to a neighboring cell only if there is no wall between them. Never cross a wall.
4. You may go around the ring, toward the center or away from it.
5. There is exactly one path from the entrance to the center. If you find two, you have crossed a wall.

A real easy maze

This maze has 187 cells. The path from the entrance to the center uses 83 of them, which is 44 percent. Along the way it moves around a ring 39 times, toward the center 25 times and away from the center 18 times. Because the maze is perfect (see below), the red line on the solution is the one answer.

The three kinds of move

A beginner often thinks the way to the middle must always go inward. The red path above shows it does not: 18 of its 82 moves go outward. There are three kinds of move:

• Along a ring, clockwise or counterclockwise, through an opening in a spoke.
• Inward, to the ring closer to the center, through a gap in an arc.
• Outward, the same gap in the other direction.

An arc that seems to block you can have a gap you cannot yet see. Follow each corridor to its end before you decide it is a dead end.

Why a perfect maze has no loops

LogikLand builds each circular maze as a perfect maze: from any cell there is exactly one route to any other cell. It is made by digging corridors from the outer ring, always continuing from the last cell until it is stuck, then going back to the last cell that still has an unvisited neighbor. That method makes long, winding corridors.

This gives you two checks you can use while solving. First, if you ever come back to a cell you have already passed, you have gone round a loop that cannot exist, so you crossed a wall by mistake. Second, a corridor that ends in a wall on three sides is a true dead end, and the only way forward is to go back to the last fork. Nothing hides an alternative route behind it.

The four levels

More rings mean a longer path and more dead ends. Averaged over 300 mazes, the path of an easy maze has about 73 cells and the path of an expert maze about 361.

Making a book of circular mazes

There is no free single-maze tool for circular mazes. To make a book, create a free account and open the Circular Mazes assistant. You choose the levels and how many mazes each gets, the page size, one maze per page (two per page when the book has only easy and medium mazes in 8.5 x 11 inches) and how many solutions go on a page. A "How to solve" page can be added at the start of the book. For square mazes and mazes in shapes, see themaze book generator.

To learn how to find the path, read how to solve a circular maze. A pack you can print is in printable easy circular mazes, and for harder mazes see advanced circular maze techniques.

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