Hard printable mazes
86 mazes that start where the ordinary hard sheet stops: three named rungs above hard, an extreme tier past expert, compact sheets that print two or four boards a page, and US Letter versions that need no rescaling.
86 printable sheets ·
Checked and published by 
Nora Quill
Hard mazes, 26 by 34, the original set
Twenty five boards of 884 squares, one to an A4 page at just under 7mm a square, carved the way every maze on this site is carved: corridors that run a long way before they branch, so a wrong turn costs real distance before it closes on you. Each board carries between 81 and 102 dead ends, and the card under it states the exact count and the exact route length measured off that board rather than a level word. This is the set most people arriving here are looking for, and every group below it is a step in one direction or another.
Difficult, very hard and advanced: three named rungs above hard
Hard and expert were the only two levels on this page, and the jump between them nearly doubles the board. These three sit in and around that gap, and each one is a real change rather than a heading. Difficult is 28 by 37, so 1,036 squares against 884, and it carries 106 to 114 dead ends. Very hard is 31 by 41, 1,271 squares, 120 to 137 dead ends. Advanced is the odd one and deliberately so: 33 by 44, but carved with high branching, which leaves 280 to 294 dead ends on it, roughly one square in five where the others run at one in ten. The route through an advanced board is shorter and you meet a fork every few steps, so it is a different kind of hard rather than simply more of it. Pick advanced if what you enjoy is being wrong often and cheaply, and very hard if you would rather be wrong rarely and expensively.
Expert mazes, 34 by 45
Twenty five boards of 1,530 squares at about 5.3mm a square, which was the largest single maze this site printed from the day it opened until the group below this one shipped. The dead end count runs from 144 to 170 and the correct route reaches several hundred steps. If the 26 by 34 sheets are going down without much of a fight, this is the honest next size, and it is still comfortably inside what a home printer and an ordinary pencil can handle.
Extreme and impossible mazes, the tier above expert
This is the group people are describing when they go looking for the hardest maze in the world, and it did not exist here until now. An extreme board is 44 by 58, which is 2,552 squares, 67 percent more than an expert sheet, printed at 4.09mm a square with 243 to 273 dead ends. An impossible board is 52 by 69, 3,588 squares at 3.46mm, with 348 to 368 dead ends: the densest grid that still prints cleanly on one A4 page at full size, and the largest maze on the site. Both are carved with long corridors rather than heavy branching, which is what keeps the correct route long, and the walls are drawn thinner to match the smaller squares. Print these at 100 percent or actual size, never fit to page, and use a pencil.
Compact hard mazes: two and four boards to a page
These eight sheets save paper without turning the paths into hairlines. Four carry two 34 by 22 boards stacked down the page and labelled A and B, each carved with heavy branching so it forks constantly despite the smaller grid. Four more carry four 16 by 21 boards, A through D, for shorter rounds. The squares still print at 5mm and above, which is enough room for an ordinary pen, and no two boards on the same page are ever the same maze: that is checked before the sheet is written rather than assumed from different seeds.
US Letter versions, so nothing has to be rescaled
Every other sheet here is A4, 210 by 297mm. A US Letter page is 215.9 by 279.4mm, shorter and wider, so an A4 maze sent to a Letter printer either comes out at 94 percent or loses a strip off the bottom, and the print dialog quietly decides which. These six are drawn on a Letter page from the start and their grids are proportioned to it, 34 by 43 for the hard ones and 46 by 58 for the extreme ones, so they are their own mazes and not the A4 boards reprinted smaller. Set the scale to 100 percent or actual size and there is nothing else to change.
What is on this page
Eighty six mazes in six groups, every one a full page with its answer sheet as the final page of its PDF, and nothing to sign up for. Twenty five are the 26 by 34 board this page opened with and twenty five are the 34 by 45 expert board. The other thirty six were added because the two sizes on their own were not answering what people were actually asking for: three named rungs in and around the gap between them, an extreme tier that goes well past expert, sheets that print two or four boards on one page, and versions drawn for US Letter paper.
What actually makes a maze hard?
Size, first: a bigger grid means more corridors to read and a longer route to trace. Then branching, which decides whether a wrong turn costs you thirty steps or three. Everything else, the theme, the artwork, the word printed at the top, changes nothing at all. Both numbers are on every card here.
The size ladder, with the numbers
The board is the mechanic on this site, so the ladder is stated in squares rather than adjectives. Dead ends are counted on each finished board, and they track the size closely enough to be worth quoting as a range:
- Hard, 26 by 34. 884 squares, 81 to 102 dead ends, corridors about 6.9mm wide.
- Difficult, 28 by 37. 1,036 squares, 106 to 114 dead ends.
- Very hard, 31 by 41. 1,271 squares, 120 to 137 dead ends.
- Expert, 34 by 45. 1,530 squares, 144 to 170 dead ends.
- Extreme, 44 by 58. 2,552 squares, 243 to 273 dead ends, corridors down to 4.1mm.
- Impossible, 52 by 69. 3,588 squares, 348 to 368 dead ends, corridors 3.5mm. The largest board that still prints cleanly on one sheet.
Route length is deliberately not in that list. It swings enormously with the individual board: two 26 by 34 mazes built the same way measured 175 steps and 459 steps, so a claim that one tier always has a longer route than another would be false about half the time. The exact figure for the board in front of you is on its card, measured off that board.
Branching, and why more forks is not simply harder
The advanced sheets are carved differently rather than bigger. A maze like this is a tree: every square is reachable, and there is one way to reach it. That fixes the total amount of corridor, so if a board has many junctions it must also have many short dead ends, and if it has few junctions its dead ends run long.
An advanced board puts about one square in five at a dead end, where the rest of this page runs at one in ten. You meet a fork every few steps and you find out you were wrong almost immediately. A very hard board asks fewer questions and punishes a wrong answer much harder. Neither is the harder one in general, and the page does not pretend otherwise: pick whichever kind of mistake you would rather make.
How to actually solve one
Tracing forward from the entrance is the slow way on a board this size, because most branches you meet are dead ends and you find that out only after committing to them. Two approaches work better:
- Work backwards from the exit. The end of the route usually has fewer branches feeding into it, so the last third of the path falls out quickly.
- Fill the dead ends. Shade in any corridor that terminates. Repeat, and the shading spreads inward until what is left unshaded is the route. It is slower to start and much faster to finish.
On the branchy boards the second method is dramatically faster, because there are hundreds of stubs to remove and each one goes in a single stroke. On the long corridor boards the first is usually quicker. Both are more pleasant with a pencil than a pen, for the obvious reason.
One route, and it is provable
Each maze is generated as a perfect maze, which means exactly one path connects the entrance to the exit. There are no loops and no second solution, and the site solves every board and checks that the route exists before it is published rather than trusting the method. On a sheet with several hundred dead ends that guarantee is the difference between a puzzle and a frustration, because it tells you a wrong turn is always a wrong turn and never a longer way round.
The sheets that carry two or four boards get the same treatment twice or four times over, and they are additionally checked against each other, so the same maze can never appear twice on one page.
Printing a dense grid, on A4 or US Letter
Scaling matters more here than anywhere else on the site. Set it to 100 percent or "actual size". At 52 by 69 the corridors are 3.5mm wide, which is close to the smallest that survives a home printer, and letting the dialog shrink the page by even a few percent is what turns the walls into a grey smudge. The wall weight is reduced on the larger grids to keep the corridors open, so there is nothing left to give.
Most of these are A4, 210 by 297mm. If your printer is loaded with US Letter, which is 215.9 by 279.4mm, six of the sheets are drawn for that page from the start with their grids proportioned to it, and they need no scaling at all. If your printer is running low on toner, use a 26 by 34 or a 28 by 37 sheet rather than one of the extreme boards. Faint output is much less forgiving at the smaller square size.
The answer sheet, and finding a board again
The solution is the last page of the same PDF with the route drawn through the grid, and the multi board sheets show every route on one answer page. Each description also ends with a puzzle number, which is the value the generator used to build that specific board, so it identifies the maze permanently. For medium through expert boards and compact pages in one audience-focused set, use the printable mazes for adults. The Maze Maker produces the four standard sizes on demand if you want more.
And if the extreme section above is the part of this page you keep coming back to, it has grown into its own home: the extreme mazes page carries a full set of extreme and impossible boards on fresh grids, plus US Letter versions, none of them repeats of the sheets here.
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.