Daily Maze

How to play Daily Maze

Daily Maze is a fresh maze puzzle you can solve every day. Each day the game builds one perfect maze for each size, and because the maze is generated from the calendar date, every single player in the world gets the exact same maze on the same day. Your task is simple to describe and satisfying to master: guide your marker from the green start in the top-left corner to the amber flag in the bottom-right corner, moving only through the open passages of the maze. The catch is that a fast, clean solve scores far more than a slow, wandering one — so the game is really a daily race against the clock, against the maze, and against everyone else chasing the same layout. When you want more, a Practice button spins up an endless supply of random mazes so you can train as much as you like.

The goal

Start at the top-left cell and reach the bottom-right cell. The marker moves one cell at a time in the four cardinal directions, but only where a passage is open; you can never step through a wall. The maze always has a route from start to goal — in fact it has exactly one — so there is no such thing as an impossible Daily Maze. When your marker lands on the flag, the maze is solved, your time stops, and your score is calculated from how quickly and how efficiently you finished. Choose from three sizes: Easy is an 8×8 grid, Medium is 12×12, and Hard is 16×16. Larger mazes have longer solutions, more dead ends, and higher score ceilings.

The daily challenge — the same maze worldwide

This is what makes Daily Maze different from an ordinary maze generator. Instead of a random layout each time, the daily maze is produced from a seed derived from the current UTC date, so the maze resets once per day at midnight UTC and is identical for everybody, everywhere, for the whole of that day. A player in Kuala Lumpur, London or São Paulo who opens the Hard maze on the same date sees precisely the same walls, the same dead ends and the same optimal path. That shared layout is what makes the leaderboard fair and fun: you are not comparing your run against a maze nobody else will ever see, you are comparing it against the exact puzzle your friends and rivals are solving today. The date of the current maze is shown above the board so you always know which day you are playing. Come back tomorrow and the whole thing changes.

What a “perfect” maze is

Every maze in this game is a perfect maze, which is a precise mathematical idea, not just a marketing word. A perfect maze has exactly one path between any two cells: no loops, no isolated islands, and no separate sections you cannot reach. In graph terms the maze is a spanning tree over the grid of cells — it connects every cell using the fewest possible passages, which for a grid of N cells is always N minus one passages. Two consequences matter to you as a player. First, the maze is always solvable, guaranteed, because a tree connects everything. Second, there is a single, unique shortest route from the start to the goal, and the game measures its length with a breadth-first search and shows it as the “optimal” number in the heads-up display. That optimal figure is the best any human or computer could ever do on that maze, so it is the benchmark you are trying to match.

Controls

• On a computer, use the arrow keys or the W, A, S and D keys to move up, left, down and right. Each key press is one step in that direction, provided a passage is open.
• On a phone or tablet, swipe across the board in the direction you want to move — a short swipe up, down, left or right walks one cell that way.
• An on-screen direction pad sits below the board for touch play or for anyone who prefers tapping. Its four large buttons mirror the arrow keys.
• Your current route is drawn as a blue trail. When you double back down a corridor the trail shortens automatically, so the highlighted path always shows a clean route from the start to where you are standing now.

Winning and scoring

You win the instant your marker reaches the goal flag. Your score rewards two things: speed and efficiency. The formula is score = max(1, base − seconds × 2 − extraMoves × 3), where base depends on the maze size (larger mazes have a higher base), seconds is your finishing time, and extraMoves is how many more steps you took than the optimal path — so retracing your steps out of a dead end is what costs you. Every second trims two points and every wasted step trims three, but the score can never drop below one and never exceeds 99,999 so it always fits on the leaderboard. A flawless run that follows the optimal path in almost no time earns close to the full base; a slow, meandering solve earns much less. Sign in and your best score for each size is recorded on the leaderboard.

Strategy tips

• Follow one wall. The classic “wall-follower” trick — keep your right (or left) hand on the wall and never let go — is guaranteed to lead you from the start to the goal of any perfect maze, because a perfect maze has no loops to trap you in a circle. It is not the shortest route, but it will never get you lost.
• Look ahead before you commit. Long straight corridors are cheap to walk but dead ends are expensive, because every step into a dead end is a step you must also take back out, and both count as moves. Scan the corridor ahead and avoid obvious traps.
• Aim for the diagonal. The start and goal sit in opposite corners, so as a rough heuristic, passages that carry you down and to the right make progress while passages that send you up or left usually do not. Use this to break ties when a junction offers several choices.
• Study the maze before you move on the daily. Since the layout is the same all day, it pays to plan your route with your eyes first, then execute it quickly — the timer only rewards the moving part, and a planned run wastes far fewer moves in dead ends.
• Warm up in Practice. Practice mazes are random and unranked, perfect for learning the wall-follower method or drilling a size before you spend your best effort on today’s ranked maze.

Frequently asked questions