Click Mazes
http://www.clickmazes.com
Grade: A+

Date reviewed: 8/13/04

Variety is the spice of life, so they say. And interactivity is the heart of the web. So a website with a variety of interactive puzzles is like a spicy web of live hearts.

Okay, so I'm not good at the analogies. Doesn't matter. Check out this site. Andrea Gilbert has been creating mazes since she was a child in the 1970's, making them more complex as the decades passed. Way back in 1997, she created this site as a kind of showcase for the static mazes she'd drawn over the years, but it quickly evolved with the introduction of Java.

For many of the mazes, just figuring out the rules and how to operate the applet can be a challenge; but once you get into them, you discover you don't really know what a challenge is. There are Tilt Mazes, based on the classic mechanical toys in which you roll a marble down passageways. Plank Mazes, based on the familiar out-in-the-woods team-building excersises, in which you have to cross a swamp using nothing but three planks. Color-zone mazes, in which you have to move an oblong block onto a particular point on the grid, making sure the block is never touching more than one color at a time. Multi-state logic mazes. Sokoban mazes. There's a lot here.

And then there are the non-maze puzzles: Blackbox, based on the 1970's game, no longer made but occasionally found at garage sales (and my cousins' basement, where it provided many hours of fun for our family). Wriggle Puzzles, in which you have to align a worm along a colored path. These are not quite as difficult as the mazes, but still a lot of fun.

This site is also home to a number of brilliant, unusual puzzles designed by Oskar van Deventer that I can't even begin to explain. You'll just have to see them for yourself!