Overview
Most mazes sit on a plain square grid. An Archimedean Maze swaps that grid for a semiregular tiling — one of the classic patterns where two or three regular polygons meet the same way at every corner, so the page fills with octagons hugging little squares, or triangles woven through hexagons, like a tiled floor or a stained-glass window. You solve it exactly as you would any maze — find the single route from Start (S) to Finish (E) — but instead of stepping along square corridors you move from tile to tile wherever two of them share an open edge. Because the tiles come in different shapes and meet at odd angles, the path is far harder to eyeball than graph paper, which is what makes these such striking, unusual pages in a maze book.
Archimedean Mazes come in seven tilings, and every one of them solves the same way.
The Goal
Find the one continuous route that connects S to E by stepping between tiles that share an open edge. Every Archimedean Maze ships with its solution already drawn.
The Rules
- One path, always. Like every Puzzle Maker Pro maze, an Archimedean Maze is a perfect maze — there is exactly one route between Start and Finish, with no loops. Every other branch is a dead end.
- Move where edges are open. Two neighbouring tiles share a wall that is either open (you can step between them) or closed (a drawn wall). The maze opens just enough of those shared edges to leave a single path and walls the rest.
- The pattern is always visible. The tiling is drawn as faint ghost edges under the walls, so you can always see the octagons, hexagons or triangles even where a passage is open. The bold lines are walls; the light lines just show the shape of the tiles.
- Dead ends are real. A run of tiles that stops going anywhere is a dead end — back up to the last junction and try another neighbour.
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 tile, try its open neighbours one at a time. Follow a chain until it reaches the other marker or dead-ends, then back up. Because there are no loops, backing up never loses progress.
- Pencil lightly. Shade the runs you have ruled out; the unbroken chain of tiles from S to E is your answer.
The Seven Tilings
All seven are semiregular (Archimedean) tilings — regular polygons meeting identically at every vertex. They only change the look and feel of the maze; the rule never changes.
- Octagonal — octagons packed together with small squares in the gaps (the classic bathroom-floor tiling). Roomy tiles and clean right-ish angles make this the friendliest starting pattern.
- Kagome — the woven “basket” tiling of triangles and hexagons. The path threads between the two shapes and reads like a lattice.
- Dodecagonal — big twelve-sided polygons ringed by triangles. Large tiles, wide corridors, a bold graphic look.
- Prismatic — bands of squares alternating with rows of triangles, giving the maze a striped, directional feel.
- Rosette — hexagons, squares and triangles arranged into little flower-like clusters, so the path curls around rosettes as it goes.
- Medallion — the richest pattern: twelve-sided polygons, hexagons and squares together, like an ornamental tiled medallion.
- Whirl — squares and triangles set in a pinwheel spin, so the whole page looks like it is turning.
Seven patterns, one rule: one path, tile to tile, S to E.
Play It Online
Archimedean 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 right in the browser by dragging to trace the path from tile to tile — mouse or finger — with a built-in check and a timer. Every one of the seven tilings plays online, because each is a straight-edged, tile-based maze the player draws directly from the tile edges. You can even gate later puzzles behind a short email sign-up, turning a free game into a lead magnet. How the player works (drawing, retracing, checking) is covered once in How to Play Puzzles Online.
Outcome
You can now solve an Archimedean Maze on any of the seven tilings: trace from both ends, step between tiles that share an open edge, and back up out of dead ends. Want a whole book of them — octagons, hexagons, pinwheels, medallions, each one unique — and an online version to hand out? That’s what Puzzle Maker Pro’s Archimedean Mazes module does.