Printable maze · Themes
Ocean maze
A maze carved into the shape of a fish, at three sizes. Exactly one route runs from start to finish, so there is always an answer and never a shortcut.
Print the page above, or take the easy grid as a PDF. Both carry the answer key, and large print is a setting rather than a separate file.
Show the answer key
Print the page above, or take the medium grid as a PDF. Both carry the answer key, and large print is a setting rather than a separate file.
Show the answer key
Print the page above, or take the hard grid as a PDF. Both carry the answer key, and large print is a setting rather than a separate file.
Show the answer key
About Ocean
Ocean covers about seventy percent of Earth's surface and holds roughly ninety-seven percent of its water. Sunlight reaches only the top few hundred meters, so most of that volume sits in permanent darkness, where animals make their own light through chemical reactions. Currents move heat from the equator toward the poles, shaping climate far inland. The deepest known point, the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench, lies close to eleven kilometers below the surface, deeper than Mount Everest is tall.
Why a fish
The silhouette is a fish seen from the side, with a tapered body, a fanned tail and a fin breaking the upper line. Fish are the ocean's most numerous vertebrates, so the outline stands in for the whole sunlit water column and gives this ocean maze a border of curves rather than corners.
Teachers building a marine science unit and parents planning an aquarium visit print this the day before.
What is in this maze
A 10 by 10 maze cut into the shape of a fish, with a single route of 42 steps and 26 turns from start to finish.
| Size | Grid | Shortest route | Turns |
|---|---|---|---|
| easy | 10 x 10 | 42 steps | 26 |
| medium | 16 x 16 | 100 steps | 59 |
| hard | 24 x 24 | 198 steps | 138 |
How to solve a Ocean maze
Every maze here is perfect, which is a precise thing rather than a compliment: there are no loops and no islands, so exactly one route joins any two points. That has a useful consequence. Keep one hand on the wall and never take it off, and you will walk the whole maze and arrive at the exit. It always works on a perfect maze. It is also slow, because it walks you into every dead end on the way.
Filling dead ends is faster. Find any square with walls on three sides, shade it in, and treat it as solid. That usually creates a new dead end next to it, so keep going. When you run out, what is left unshaded is the route. On the easy grid that is a few minutes of work; on the hard one it is the whole puzzle, and it is how most people who solve mazes quickly actually do it.
Working backwards is the third trick, and it exploits how a maze is built. Passages branch far more often near the start than near the finish, so tracing from the exit means fewer wrong turns to reject. On a shaped maze the outline helps too: the fish silhouette is solid wall, so a corridor running along the edge of the shape has nowhere to branch and can be followed at speed.