Overview
Most mazes are built from square corridors. A Bubble Maze is built from circles: a field of packed round cells, each touching its neighbours. You solve it the same way as any maze — find the single route from Start (S) to Finish (E) — but instead of walking down corridors, you hop from circle to circle wherever two of them are connected. The result looks less like a grid and more like a cluster of soap bubbles or a spray of coins, which is exactly what makes it a fresh, eye-catching page in a maze book.
Bubble Mazes come in two shapes, and both solve the same way.
The Goal
Find the one continuous route that connects S to E by stepping between connected circles. Every Bubble Maze ships with its solution already drawn.
The Rules
- One path, always. Like every Puzzle Maker Pro maze, a Bubble 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 circles touch. Two neighbouring circles are either open (you can step between them) or walled off. The maze opens just enough connections to leave a single path and walls the rest.
- Dead ends are real. A chain of circles 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 circle, 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 chains you have ruled out; the unbroken run of circles from S to E is your answer.
The Two Shapes
Bubbles — a packing of circles of varying size, from big open cells to tight little ones. Larger books look great with the bubbles shaped into a silhouette (a heart, an animal) so the whole cloud takes a form — that’s a Creative-edition trick covered in How to Make Shaped Mazes with Masking.
Circle Fractal — an Apollonian gasket: a few big circles with smaller circles packed into every gap, again and again, down to tiny ones. The twist that makes it a real puzzle: the big circles are never directly connected to each other, so the only way across is to weave through the ring of small circles nested between them. It reads like a mandala and solves like a proper maze.
The shape changes the look and the feel; the rule never changes — one path, circle to circle, S to E.
Play It Online
Bubble 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 bubble to bubble — mouse or finger — with a built-in check and a timer. 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 a Bubble Maze in either shape: trace from both ends, step between connected circles, and weave through the small circles when the big ones won’t connect. Want a whole book of them — round, shaped, or fractal, each one unique — and an online version to hand out? That’s what Puzzle Maker Pro’s Bubble Mazes module does.