Overview
Most mazes use square corridors. A Shard Maze is built from angular glass pieces — straight-edged panels of all shapes and sizes, packed edge to edge like a stained-glass window or a cracked ceramic glaze. You solve it the same way as any maze: find the single route from Start (S) to Finish (E), moving from piece to piece through the small doorways cut in the walls between them. The look is dramatic and unlike any grid maze — a striking page for a maze book.
The Goal
Find the one continuous route that connects S to E by stepping between neighbouring glass pieces through the open doorways. Every Shard Maze ships with its solution already drawn.
The Rules
- One path, always. Like every Puzzle Maker Pro maze, a Shard Maze is a perfect maze — exactly one route between Start and Finish, no loops. Every other branch is a dead end.
- Move through the doorways. Two neighbouring pieces are either joined by a small door (a gap in the wall between them) or fully walled off. Because the pieces are large, the door is a short opening, not the whole shared edge — so the wall stays visible and the maze reads clearly.
- Dead ends are real. A run of pieces that stops going anywhere is a dead end — back up to the last junction and try another door.
How to Start Solving
- Find S and E and trace from both ends. Working inward from the Finish as well as the Start meets in the middle faster.
- At each piece, take its open doors one at a time. Follow a run until it reaches the other marker or dead-ends, then back up. No loops means backing up never loses progress.
- Pencil lightly. Shade the runs you have ruled out; the unbroken route from S to E is your answer.
The Two Shapes
Shards — a few full-length oblique cuts slice the panel into big convex pieces, like a shattered sheet of glass. Fewer, larger shards make a bold, open maze.
Craquelure — short cracks branch and stop where they meet other cracks, again and again, crazing the surface into many small tiles like an old ceramic glaze or dried mud. It packs far more pieces into the same space, so it reads busier and solves tighter.
The shape changes the look and the density; the rule never changes — one path, piece to piece, S to E.
Play It Online
Shard Mazes aren’t only for print. With the Productivity edition, a set can be published to your website as an interactive game: visitors solve it in the browser by dragging to trace the path from piece to piece — mouse or finger — with a built-in check and a timer, and an optional email sign-up to unlock later puzzles for lead capture. How the player works is covered once in How to Play Puzzles Online.
Outcome
You can now solve a Shard Maze in either shape: trace from both ends and step between the glass pieces through their doorways. Want a whole book of them — bold shards or fine craquelure, each one unique — and an online version to hand out? That’s what Puzzle Maker Pro’s Shard Mazes module does.