Animal mazes
30 mazes carved inside animal silhouettes, so the page a child prints looks like the animal they picked, not a rectangle with a picture in the corner. Both openings sit on the outline, and every sheet ships its solution.
30 printable sheets ·
Checked and published by 
Nora Quill
Fish mazes
Five boards inside a fish with a proper tail fin. The wide body carries the tangle and the tail is a genuine detour: swim in one side, out the other.
Butterfly mazes
Five boards across four wings and a body. The waist between the wings pinches the maze into narrow crossings, which is what makes a butterfly board trickier than its size suggests.
Rabbit mazes
Five boards of body, head and two long ears. The ears are corridors with almost no forks, so the real decisions happen lower down, and an opening often hides at the tip of one.
Turtle mazes
Five boards of shell, head and feet. The dome holds most of the squares; the head and feet are pockets that dead end more often than not.
Cat mazes
Five boards inside a cat face with pointed ears. The ears are twin traps: two triangular pockets of corridors where one usually holds an opening and the other holds nothing.
Owl mazes
Five boards of round body, head and ear tufts. The biggest silhouettes on this page, and the hard size owl is the densest animal board of the set.
The animal is the maze
Most animal maze sheets are a rectangle of corridors with a clip-art animal in the corner. Here the silhouette itself is the board: the corridors are carved inside the outline of a fish, a butterfly, a rabbit, a turtle, a cat face or an owl, and the entrance and exit sit on the animal's own edge. When a child solves the fish, they swim in one side and out the other.
The shape genuinely changes the puzzle. A butterfly pinches every route through the narrow waist between its wings. A rabbit's ears are long corridors with nowhere to branch. The turtle's head and feet are pockets that mostly dead end. None of that happens on a rectangle, and it is why two animal mazes of the same size can feel completely different to solve.
Three sizes per animal
Each animal comes in easy, medium and hard, and the size words mean grid sizes: roughly 20, 27 and 34 cells across, stated on every card together with the measured route length and dead end count of that exact board. Easy animal boards suit the same children as the easy mazes page; the hard owl and hard cat hold their own against a mid-size classic board.
Good uses for a shaped maze
Animal units at school are the obvious one: a maze in the shape of the week's animal is a five minute settle-down activity that still counts as pencil control practice. They also work as party table sheets, and the easy fish has quietly become the recommended first shaped maze here because the tail gives it an unmistakable finish line. For a themed set that changes with the calendar instead, the Christmas, Halloween and Thanksgiving pages use the same shaped engine on seasonal silhouettes.
Printing and solutions
Every sheet is a free PDF on a true A4 page with a 15mm margin, printed at 100 percent or actual size, and every maze finishes with a solution page, the route drawn through the animal in colour. The catalogue number under each board identifies that exact maze forever.
How to use these sheets
- Pick a sheet and press Print. The file is a PDF sized for A4 and Letter paper.
- Print it in black and white at normal quality. None of these sheets need colour ink except the colour by number pages.
- Keep the answer page for yourself, or print it too if you want to check the work later.