MazesExpert
Mazes for adults
One large 32 × 42 maze per page with 1,344 cells and a single route through. It is meant for adults and teens who want a long pencil puzzle with a printable answer.
- Fresh problems every time
- Answer key on its own page
- Print or PDF, Letter or A4
- Free, no sign-up
On this page
Expert is the biggest maze on the site: 32 cells across and 42 down, or 1,344 cells, fit onto a single letter-size page. The walls are fine lines, and the corridors are narrow.
What prints
The page is called "Expert Maze". Its direction is to draw a line from the top through the paths to the finish, staying inside the walls. "Start" is printed above the entry at the top left and "Finish" below the exit at the bottom right. Wall lines are drawn at the thinnest weight the sheet uses, so use a fine pen or a sharp pencil. The next page is the answer key, which shows the same maze with the route as a thick colored line.
The settings
- Difficulty: set to Expert, the top size at 32 × 42 cells. Choose Hard to drop to 22 × 28.
- Mazes per page: a single maze per sheet, or two if you prefer smaller ones.
At two per page, an Expert maze is turned sideways and becomes 42 × 26, which is 1,092 cells per maze. It is the same difficulty tier but each half page is smaller, so the print is finer.
What makes it hard
The generator is a depth-first recursive backtracker. It carves out a path from the top-left cell and only backs up when it is stuck, so the maze has no loops and a lot of long corridors. Many of those corridors end in dead ends that stretch a long way before the wall appears. With a thousand cells, there are many branches to work through, and the one correct path is long.
Because every cell is connected and nothing loops, you can always solve it by methodical elimination. Whenever a corridor leads to a dead end, you can cross the whole branch out.
A word about brain games
The National Institute on Aging page cited here discusses what the ACTIVE trial found about cognitive training and states there is not enough evidence that commercial brain-training games have the same effect. This sheet makes no such claim. It is a printable pastime, and any worry about memory or thinking is a question for a doctor.
Worked example: waiting-room pencil
Gloria prints two Expert mazes and puts them in her bag, along with a mechanical pencil. At an appointment she starts from Finish, because the exit is in a tight pocket of the maze and only two corridors lead to it. She marks three dead ends with small crosses and moves back toward Start. After about fifteen minutes she has a route from corner to corner. At home she lays her pencil line over the key page, and the two lines match.
Related
Try hard mazes for something shorter, or printable mazes to change the size. For a puzzle with words in place of corridors, the word search for adults page has harder grids.