How to Play
Randomaze drops you inside a brand new maze and asks one thing of you: find the way out. You see the maze from the inside, one step at a time, with a map beside the view to help you keep your bearings. There is no timer. What counts is how few moves you need to escape (the optional daily leaderboard also shows how long you took).
The goal
Every maze has two or more openings in its outer wall. You start at one of them, facing in. Only one other opening is the true exit, and walking out through it solves the maze. If you try to leave through a wrong opening, a wall drops down and seals it, so don't count on backing out the way you came in.
Controls
On a computer, use the keyboard. On a phone or tablet, tap the buttons drawn over the maze view (tap Hide to tuck them away and Show to bring them back).
| Keyboard | Touch button | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| ↑ | Forward | Step forward, or open the door in front of you |
| ↓ | Backward | Step back without turning around |
| ← | Left | Turn left |
| → | Right | Turn right |
| PG UP | Up | Climb a ladder up to the floor above |
| PG DN | Down | Climb a ladder down to the floor below |
The gear button beside the map takes you back to the main menu. Your maze waits for you: press Start Game again to carry on where you left off. The speaker buttons turn the music and sound effects on and off and change the volume.
Doors, keys and rings
Some passages are closed by doors. A plain door opens as soon as you walk into it. A coloured door is locked, and only opens if you are carrying the matching key or ring.
Keys and rings lie on the floor somewhere in the maze. Walk onto one to pick it up; it appears in your inventory under the map, and it stays with you for the rest of the maze. Bigger mazes have more locked doors, so part of the puzzle is working out which way leads to the key you need.
Don't worry about locking yourself out. Before a maze is ever shown to you, the generator checks that it can be solved and that there is no corner where you could get stuck with no way forward. If it finds one, it fixes the maze.
Floors and ladders
Most mazes have more than one floor. Ladders link a floor to the one above or below it. Stand in a ladder's cell and press PG UP or PG DN (or Up or Down on a touch screen) to climb. The map shows each floor of the maze, so you can see which floor you are on.
One-way walls
Some mazes have a few one-way passages: you can walk through them in one direction, but from the other side they are a solid wall. The map marks them with an arrow pointing the way you can go. Think before you go through one, because you may not be able to come back.
The daily maze and the other sizes
Everyone who plays on the same day gets the same daily maze. It is built from the date (in your own time zone), so a new one appears at midnight, and you can compare your result with friends who played the same maze.
Sign in with your Google account and Start Game also offers today's Small, Medium and Large mazes, and saves your results so you can track your scores. Read Scoring and Maze Sizes to see how sizes and scores work.
Tips
- Every turn counts as a move, just like a step. Look at the map before you turn, not after.
- When you find a locked door you can't open yet, remember where it is. The key is usually somewhere you haven't been.
- Dead ends are a normal part of a maze. Back out of them with ↓ to save the two moves of turning around.
- Curious how the mazes are built? How Do You Make a Maze? walks through the method, with a live demo.