Summary: The Treasure Hunt option turns a Signpost Maze inside out: instead of hiding which entrance works, it marks one starting square and hides which of several treasure chests the path actually reaches. This tutorial covers what the option is, how to set up every control on the Treasure tab — chest placement and count, the three chest markers, letter/digit/number treasures, decoy symbols — and how a meta word makes a run of puzzles spell a hidden answer.
Overview
A classic Signpost Maze asks “which entrance gets through?” The top row is full of lanes, every cell holds a signpost that forces your next move, and exactly one lane threads all the way down to the exit.
The Treasure Hunt option asks the opposite question: “where does this path end up?” One square at the top is marked as the start. You follow the signposts from there — the arrows do all the steering — and somewhere on the board the trail stops on a treasure chest. That chest is the answer. All the other chests are decoys.
It is the same engine, the same signposts, the same grid, and the same output formats as the classic maze. What changes is which end of the path is the secret — and because the answer can be a letter or a number, a treasure hunt can carry information out of the puzzle, which is what the meta-word feature at the end of this tutorial is built on.
New to the puzzle type itself? Read How Signpost Maze Puzzles Work first — everything it says about signposts and forced paths applies here unchanged. For ordinary Signpost Mazes, see How to Create Signpost Maze Puzzles in Puzzle Maker Pro.
Required Modules
The Treasure Hunt option is part of the Signpost Maze module — there is nothing extra to buy to use it. What your edition changes is how the chests can be labelled, and how many puzzles you can set up at once:
- Lite — the whole Treasure Hunt option: both chest placements, any chest count, and numbered flags on the chests (“the treasure is at flag 5”). Static PNG/JPG/SVG/PDF export of puzzle and solution.
- Creative — adds treasure symbols: a letter, digit, or number on each chest instead of (or as the label on) the flag, the decoy-symbol pool, and meta words.
- Productivity — adds Time Saver batch creation and multi-set Puzzle Book Studio.
- Interactive — an add-on on top of Creative or Productivity. For Signpost Maze it unlocks JSON output, HTML output, and online play. Online play currently covers classic Signpost Mazes only; see Export, below.
Two practical notes before you plan a book around this. Lettered chests and meta words come from Creative, while batching rows of them comes from Productivity — a batched, lettered treasure-hunt book therefore needs both, as separate purchases. And the free demo renders a watermarked raster only: no SVG or PDF. See Puzzle Maker Pro Editions Explained.
Preparation
Nothing needs preparing in advance — no word lists, no images. Two decisions are worth making before you generate a set rather than after:
- Your marker. Flags need no setup and work on every edition. Treasure symbols need a moment’s thought about the symbol pool (below), and a meta word needs the word itself.
- Your grid size, because on a bottom-row board the width is the chest count, and a long meta word therefore forces a wide board.
One thing to know before a print run: the Creator does not expose a seed for Signpost Maze, so re-generating a set produces different boards. Archive the exported images and their solutions with the manuscript rather than planning to regenerate them later.
How a Treasure Hunt Plays
Here is the same puzzle as the solver sees it, and as it appears in your answer pages:
The forced path is exactly as in a classic maze: every ordinary cell holds a signpost, you move one square the way it points, and you never choose. Two things are new:
- The green square on the top row is where the solver starts. There is only one, and it is always marked — that is the whole difference from the classic maze.
- The cream squares are the chests. They hold no signpost, so the trail simply stops when it reaches one. In the picture above they are the whole bottom row, numbered 1 to 7. Exactly one chest is the real one — the one the route from the green square actually reaches — and on the solution page it is obvious, because the route is drawn.
So the solving experience is: put a finger on the green square, follow arrow after arrow, and see where you come out. On a Hard 12×12 board that is a long, absorbing trace of eighty-odd cells; on an Easy 6×6 board it is a friendly two-minute puzzle for a young solver.
Why a wrong chest can never fool a solver
This is the design rule that makes the puzzle honest. No arrow anywhere on the board points into a decoy chest. The only cell that leads into a chest is the last step of the real route, into the real chest. Every other chest is unreachable — you cannot arrive at one, no matter which cell you start from or how badly you mis-trace.
That matters because of who solves these. A child who loses their place, restarts in the middle of the board, and lands on a chest would have no way of knowing that chest was wrong. By making wrong chests impossible to reach, the puzzle removes that failure: if your trail ends on a chest, you got there by following the arrows from the start, and the chest is right.
The other half of the guarantee is worth teaching a class or a young reader too: a trail that has drifted off the route can point back onto it, run off the edge of the board, or circle among the arrows without ever reaching a chest. Whatever a stray trail does, it can never end on a wrong chest — so if a solver gets stuck or goes round in circles, the fix is always to restart from the marked square, never to pick the nearest chest.
Where the Options Live: the Treasure Tab
Open the Signpost Maze module and you will see five tabs: Settings, Treasure, Content, Style, and Titles. Everything specific to treasure hunts lives on the Treasure tab, in a group called Treasure hunt.
The controls, top to bottom:
| Control | What it does |
|---|---|
| Type | Classic — find the entrance (default) or Treasure Hunt — find the exit. This switches the chest controls; the marker, symbols and meta word stay live on a classic maze too (see The Classic Maze Can Carry Treasures Too). |
| Chest placement | Bottom row (one per column) or Scattered in the grid. |
| Chests (0 = automatic) | How many chests a scattered board gets. 0 lets Puzzle Maker Pro decide. |
| Marker | Flags, Treasure symbols, or Flags + treasure — how each chest is labelled. |
| Symbols | Letters (A-Z), Digits (0-9), or Numbers (120, 150, 180) — what a treasure symbol is. |
| Decoy symbols | Which symbols the wrong chests may show. |
| Meta word (optional) | A word, code, or list that a run of puzzles spells out through their answers. |
Controls switch themselves off when they cannot apply, so the tab shows you what is actually in play: Chest placement needs the Treasure Hunt type, Chests (0 = automatic) needs the Scattered placement, Symbols, Decoy symbols and Meta word need a symbol-bearing marker, and the decoy box additionally applies to letters only. On a Lite seat the marker stays on Flags and the symbol controls are locked under a short upgrade note — the treasure hunt itself still works.
Two things that are not on this tab and are worth knowing now. Quantity sits above the tabs, with the presets toolbar, not on the Treasure tab. And the colours are fixed: the green start tint, the cream chest tint and the blue solution route are part of the puzzle’s built-in look and are not on the Style tab, so plan your page palette around them (see Printing, Answer Keys and Style).
Every setting is per puzzle set. If you use Time Saver, each row carries its own Treasure tab settings, so one book can hold a chapter of flag hunts and a chapter of letter hunts. Time Saver’s ready-made Add Progression rows are always classic mazes, so budget one manual pass through this tab per row.
Step by Step: Your First Treasure Hunt
- Open Signpost Maze and leave the Settings tab at its defaults for now (6 wide × 5 tall, Medium).
- Go to the Treasure tab and set Type to
Treasure Hunt — find the exit. - Leave Chest placement on
Bottom row (one per column)and Marker onFlags. - Set Quantity to 1 — it sits above the tabs, not on the Treasure tab — and generate. You will get a board with a green start square on the top row and a row of numbered flags along the bottom, plus the matching solution with the route drawn in.
- Trace it yourself once from the green square. It is the fastest way to see what your solver will experience, and it tells you immediately whether the difficulty suits your audience.
- When the board looks right, generate the set you actually need. For a 24-puzzle chapter that is one collection at Quantity 24 — with a four- or six-symbol meta word if you want the chapter to spell something — and the pages then assemble in Puzzle Book Studio exactly as classic mazes do.
Everything below is refinement: where the chests sit, how they are labelled, and what the answers can spell.
Choose Where the Chests Sit
Bottom row (one per column) — the default, and the one to start with. Every column ends in a chest, so the board reads like a row of doors along the bottom: the route works its way down and picks one. The number of chests is simply the grid width, so a 7-wide board has 7 chests, and the Chests (0 = automatic) box does not apply. This layout is the clearest for young solvers and the tidiest on a printed page.
Scattered in the grid — chests sit anywhere on the board, never orthogonally adjacent to another chest, and the route can finish in the middle of the grid rather than at the bottom. The row the route ends on varies from puzzle to puzzle (it is drawn from the lower half of the board), so a solver cannot rely on “it’s always the bottom row”. The page is busier, and note that a scattered route can be shorter than a bottom-row one at the same difficulty, because it may stop half way down: if you want the longest possible trace, use bottom-row chests.
How many chests (scattered only)
0(automatic) — the recommended setting. Puzzle Maker Pro aims for 6 chests, grows that if your meta word needs more, and settles for fewer if a particular board cannot fit them (never below 2).- An exact number, 2 to 12 — a promise rather than a preference. If a board cannot seat exactly that many chests (small grid, long route, chests not allowed to touch), generation stops with a message naming the count it could not place, rather than quietly giving you fewer.
You cannot set 1 — a hunt with a single chest is not a puzzle, so the value steps straight between 0 and 2.
Automatic is not a guarantee of a puzzle either: if a meta word needs more chests than the board can seat, 0 fails with the same message an exact count would give. Both cases stop the run rather than producing a bad board, so prove a demanding combination at Quantity 5 before committing to 120 puzzles — or leave the box on automatic with a short meta word, which is the combination least likely to fail.
More chests means a harder guess but not a longer trace; the work is in following the arrows either way. Six to eight chests is a comfortable range for most books.
Choose How the Answer Is Named: the Marker
Every chest carries the same kind of label, and you choose which kind. This is where Creative adds something to Lite.
- Flags (default, every edition) — one identical flag on every chest, numbered 1, 2, 3… in reading order. The number is how the answer gets a name: “the treasure is at flag 5.” Simple, language-free, and perfect for an answer key.
- Treasure symbols (Creative and up) — each chest shows a symbol: a letter, a digit, or a whole number. The answer is then a thing rather than a position: “the treasure is at H.” This is the mode that lets a puzzle carry information, and the one meta words are built on.
- Flags + treasure (Creative and up) — both, as a single marker: the flag is drawn with its treasure symbol as the label. You never get a flag number and a symbol on the same chest — the symbol replaces the number, so there is exactly one thing to write down.
Whichever you pick, every chest on the board gets the same treatment, so the marker never hints at the answer.
Choose Your Symbols: Letters, Digits, or Numbers
With a symbol-bearing marker, the Symbols setting decides what one chest holds:
- Letters (A-Z) — one letter per chest. Any language’s letters work, and accented letters stay distinct (É is not E), so a Spanish or French edition spells correctly.
- Digits (0-9) — one digit per chest. Good for a keypad-code or safe-combination theme.
- Numbers (120, 150, 180) — a whole number per chest, up to nine digits long. Numbers takes its scale from the meta word: type
120, 150, 180there and the decoys are generated in the same range, so a board of prices, years, or scores looks consistent. Choose Numbers with an empty meta box and there is nothing to work from, so the chests fall back to plain 0–9 — which is what the Digits source is for.
Decoy symbols: what the wrong chests may show
The Decoy symbols box controls what appears on the wrong chests. The box arrives prefilled with the full A–Z alphabet — leave it as it is, or replace it with a small set: AEIOU for a vowels puzzle, ABC for a very young book. Digits always draw from 0–9, and Numbers derives its decoys from the numbers in your meta word, so neither uses this box (it switches itself off).
Three things to know about how decoys are drawn:
- A decoy is never one of your meta-word symbols. Aim at
Hwith a meta word, and no other chest on that board will showH— a solver who traces the route and lands onHhas confirmation. Without a meta word there is nothing to aim at: every chest, winner included, is a plain draw from the pool, so on a narrow pool the winning symbol can appear on another chest too. That is harmless for an ordinary puzzle (the route still names one chest), but it is why a self-checking answer needs a meta word. - What you type is filtered, not copied. Typing
A, B, Cgives you the symbols A, B and C — the commas and spaces are never printed on a chest. - A small pool repeats rather than runs out. Narrow the pool to three letters on an eight-chest board and decoys repeat — but the whole pool is used before anything comes round again, so the spread stays even.
Accented and non-Latin words need matching decoys. The decoy pool defaults to plain A–Z. If your meta word uses É, Ñ, or any non-Latin letter, add letters of the same kind to the Decoy symbols box — otherwise the accented chest is the only one of its kind on the board and gives the answer away at a glance.
Make a Run of Puzzles Spell Something: Meta Words (Creative and up)
This is the feature that turns a set of treasure hunts into a single bigger puzzle, and the reason the answers are letters and numbers rather than just positions.
Type a word into Meta word (optional) and Puzzle Maker Pro arranges for consecutive puzzles to have exactly those answers, in order. Solve them all, read the winning chests in order, and the word appears.
The unit is one symbol per puzzle: HANS is four puzzles (Letters), 2580 is four puzzles (Digits), 120, 150, 180 is three puzzles (Numbers — separate them with spaces or commas).
A meta chapter needs only Quantity, not Time Saver: one collection at Quantity 24 with a four-letter word gives you six complete rounds. Time Saver matters only when the rows differ from each other.
The rules worth knowing before you plan a chapter around it:
- Set Quantity to a multiple of the word’s length. A four-letter word with Quantity 8 gives you two complete rounds of the word. With Quantity 10, the last two puzzles are ordinary treasure hunts whose answers still come from inside the word — they simply are not part of a complete round.
- The board needs a chest for every symbol. A four-letter word needs at least four chests: on a bottom-row board that means a grid at least four wide; on a scattered board the automatic chest count grows to fit, and if you have set an exact count below the word’s length, Puzzle Maker Pro raises it to match — up to the 12-chest maximum. A word longer than 12 symbols needs the bottom-row layout on a wide board.
- Every board still shows only one of the word’s symbols. The other chests carry decoys — never another letter from your word — so no single page gives the meta answer away.
- Keep a round contiguous and in order. The word is spelled in generation order, so shuffling puzzles, splitting a round across a chapter break, or dropping one board silently breaks it. In Time Saver, each row starts the word again from its first symbol.
- One caveat if you hand out a whole round at once. Because a word symbol never appears as a decoy anywhere, a solver comparing all the boards of one round side by side can notice that one symbol on each board never appears on any of the others — that symbol is that board’s answer. Solved one at a time, nothing leaks.
Ideas for using it: this week’s spelling word as the hidden answer; the vocabulary term a reading passage defines; a set of maths answers (type 144, 36, 81 as the meta word and three consecutive puzzles land on those numbers, one per printed sum); a child’s name for a personalised gift book; a four-digit code that opens the “answer chest” at the back of the book.
A differentiated class set
Because each Time Saver row spells the word from its own first symbol, three rows with the same meta word and different grid sizes give three ability groups the same six-letter answer at three levels, in one generate run:
| Row | Grid + difficulty | Group |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 5×4 Easy, bottom-row flags | earliest solvers |
| 2 | 7×6 Medium, letters | middle group |
| 3 | 10×8 Hard, scattered letters | fastest group |
Every group solves the same word, so the class checks against one answer.
The Classic Maze Can Carry Treasures Too
You do not have to switch to Treasure Hunt to use the symbols. Leave Type on Classic — find the entrance and set a symbol marker, and Puzzle Maker Pro adds a strip of symbols above the entry lanes — one per lane:
The classic puzzle is unchanged: find the entrance that reaches the exit. What the strip adds is a name for the answer — instead of “the third lane from the left”, the answer is “M”. That gives the classic maze the same meta-word ability, so a run of classic mazes can spell a word through the letters above their winning lanes.
Two details: the answer lane is not marked in any way (the strip is presented identically above every lane), and if you also re-skinned the signposts with your own content, the symbol strip takes the space above the grid — so a direction legend set to Top is moved to the bottom automatically. Set the legend to Left or Right if you would rather choose its side yourself.
Difficulty and Grid Size
The Settings tab controls work exactly as they do for a classic maze, and they are what you use to aim a treasure hunt at an audience:
- Difficulty changes how much of the board the route covers before it reaches its chest — not the grid size. Easy takes a short path down; Hard sweeps further across each row before dropping to the next, so there is much more line to follow. Note what does not change: the route works down the board one row at a time either way, so a Hard board is a longer trace, not a more twisting one.
- Width and Height are independent, 4 to 25 each. On a bottom-row board the width is also your chest count, so a wide board is a harder guess and a long meta word forces a wide grid — which in turn drives your trim size, since a wide grid on a small trim squeezes the cells.
- A short final approach. The route deliberately does not make a long straight run into its chest, on either layout — otherwise the last stretch would point at the answer from across the board.
Rough starting points by audience:
| Audience | Grid + difficulty | Marker |
|---|---|---|
| Ages 5–7 | 5×4 or 6×5 Easy | Flags |
| Ages 8–10 | 7×6 Medium | Letters, bottom row |
| Ages 11+ / adult puzzle book | 10×10 or larger, Hard | Letters, either placement |
Preview one page at your real trim size before committing a chapter: cell size shrinks as the grid grows, and the chest symbols shrink with it.
Printing, Answer Keys and Style
- The tints are fixed. The green start square, the cream chests and the blue solution route are part of the puzzle’s built-in look; the Style tab covers canvas colour, cell background, grid lines and the font used for letters and numbers, but not those three. Both tints are pale, so print one greyscale proof or photocopy before running a class set or a black-and-white interior — if the start square does not read, use a Custom description that names the start by position (“start at the marked square on the top row”) so the instruction survives the copy.
- Answer keys. The solution image draws the full route into the winning chest, so your answer pages work as printed pages. There is no compact text answer list today: with Flags you read the numbers off the solution images into your own key, and with a symbol marker the winning symbol is exported as machine-readable data only with the Interactive add-on. Budget solution pages accordingly — one route image per puzzle, laid out several to a page in Puzzle Book Studio.
- A meta answer belongs on its own page. Put the reveal at the back of the book or the end of the worksheet set, not on the per-puzzle key, or the first answer page gives the whole round away.
Set the Title
On the Titles tab, choose a Smart Title so every page in a batch is labelled correctly without retyping. Signpost Maze offers seven options — the examples below are for a 7×6 Medium board:
- Signpost Maze Grid Size Difficulty — e.g. “Signpost Maze 7×6 Medium”
- Signpost Maze Grid Size — e.g. “Signpost Maze 7×6”
- Signpost Maze Difficulty — e.g. “Signpost Maze Medium”
- Grid Size Difficulty — e.g. “7×6 Medium”
- Grid Size — e.g. “7×6”
- Difficulty — e.g. “Medium”
- Custom — your own title text, used exactly as typed
The same options drive the puzzle Description. Its default text was written for the classic maze — “Start at the green square and follow the signpost in each cell, one space at a time, until you reach the exit. Only one path leads all the way through!” — and only its first half fits a treasure hunt: the green square is real here, but the solver is not looking for an exit and there is no “only one path”. Use Custom and write your own, for example “Start at the green square, follow the signposts, and find the real treasure!” Smart Titles works the same way in every module — see How to Create Smart Puzzle Titles in Puzzle Maker Pro.
Export Your Puzzles
- Print / PDF — PNG, JPG, SVG, and PDF of puzzle and solution on every paid edition; the free demo renders a watermarked raster only. A treasure hunt drops into Puzzle Book Studio like any other puzzle (multi-set assembly is a Productivity feature).
- JSON and HTML — with the Interactive add-on. One limit to plan around: the online player currently plays classic Signpost Mazes. A treasure hunt will export to JSON and HTML successfully, but the player does not yet understand its chests, so keep treasure hunts to your print pages until that lands.
- Time Saver — on Productivity, batch rows of different sizes, difficulties and Treasure tab settings in one run. See How to Batch Create Puzzles with Time Saver.
Signpost Maze does not offer Interactive PDF or Puzzle Slides.
Outcome
You can now build treasure-hunt Signpost Mazes end to end: pick the type on the Treasure tab, place the chests along the bottom row or scattered across the board, choose how many, label them with numbered flags or with letter, digit, or number treasures, control what the decoy chests may show, and — with a meta word — make a whole run of puzzles spell a hidden answer that your solver can only read by solving every one of them.
FAQ
Do I need an upgrade to use the Treasure Hunt option?
No. It is part of the Signpost Maze module and Lite includes it with numbered flags. Creative adds the letter/digit/number treasure symbols, the decoy pool and meta words; batching rows of them needs Productivity as well.
Can a solver end up on the wrong chest and think they solved it?
No, and that is deliberate: no arrow on the board points into a decoy chest, so a wrong chest cannot be reached at all. A solver who drifts off the route either rejoins it, runs off the edge, or circles — and should restart from the marked square.
Can I use my own images as the treasures?
Not currently — chest treasures are letters, digits, or whole numbers. You can re-skin the four directions with your own images on the Content tab (Creative and up), and that works alongside any chest marker, so a themed board with lettered chests is a two-tab setup.
Can I put treasure symbols on a normal Signpost Maze?
Yes. Leave the Type on Classic and choose a symbol marker: a strip of symbols appears above the entry lanes, and the symbol above the winning lane is the answer — which also lets classic mazes spell a meta word.
Can my solvers play treasure hunts online?
Not yet. They export to JSON and HTML with the Interactive add-on, but the online player currently understands classic Signpost Mazes only, so treat treasure hunts as print puzzles for now.
Does the Time Saver progression create treasure hunts?
No — “Add Progression” builds rows that vary grid size and difficulty, and those rows are classic mazes. Switch each row to Treasure Hunt after adding it; every row keeps its own settings.