Scan before moving
Spot long corridors, dead ends, and promising directions near the start before drawing your route.
Maze Runner & Pathfinding
A mobile-first maze drawing game with 120 progressive levels, daily challenges, A* versus BFS visualization, sound effects, and anonymous challenge sharing.
Draw a route by hand, then compare BFS and A* shortest paths and search efficiency on the same maze.
Level 69
9×9 maze
⏱ 0:00
Shortest22
Moves0
Time0:00
Press the green start and drag through open passages to the orange goal.
YouToStem · Strategy
📘 Maze Pathfinding Strategy Guide
Remember junctions
Treat each fork as a checkpoint. If a branch ends, backtrack to the latest junction and try another route.
Understand BFS
BFS expands like a wave. In an unweighted grid, the first route it finds to the goal is guaranteed shortest.
Understand A*
A* adds an estimate of the remaining distance and explores promising directions first, often visiting fewer nodes.
❓ Maze Pathfinding FAQ
How do you play Maze Runner & Pathfinding?
Press the green start and drag through open passages to the orange goal. You can also tap adjacent cells one at a time and return to the previous cell to backtrack.
What is the difference between BFS and A*?
BFS explores evenly by distance without aiming toward the goal. A* uses Manhattan distance as a goal-aware heuristic, so it often visits fewer nodes.
Why do both algorithms show the same path length?
Every move has equal cost. BFS and A* with an admissible heuristic therefore both guarantee a shortest route, though their search order and visited-node counts differ.
How do the 120 levels become harder?
Mazes grow from 5×5 to 13×13. Later stages add more area and a few loops, demanding stronger navigation, route memory, and branch elimination.
Is the daily challenge the same for everyone?
Yes. The date creates one deterministic solvable maze for all players that day, and a new challenge appears the next day.
Do shared challenges require an account?
No. The URL stores the maze seed, level, moves, and time so a friend can replay the exact same maze anonymously.
Which skills does maze pathfinding train?
It develops spatial planning, working memory, backtracking, and graph-search intuition while making BFS and A* behavior visible.
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