Maze Race
Two to four players run the same maze, each on their own copy, and none of you can see it until you walk it. Steer your runner one cell at a time with the four keys, the arrows or a swipe; hold a key and it keeps going. The first to reach the far corner wins.
The rules
- Everybody runs the same maze. It is drawn from the game's seed, fifteen cells by fifteen, and every seat gets an identical copy; the seed is published when the race is over so the maze can be checked.
- You start in the top-left corner, a1, and the way out is the bottom-right corner, o15. You know where the exit is from the first moment; you do not know the walls between you and it.
- You can see as far down a corridor as the corridor goes, and no further. A cell you have stood in shows its four walls, and so does every cell you can see in a straight line from it. The rest is fog.
- A move is one step: press a direction and your runner moves one cell that way. Hold the key and it keeps stepping. A direction with a wall across it is refused, and the keys show you which ways are open.
- Your runner moves at a fixed speed, one cell at a time, and the next step cannot start before the last one has landed. The race is won by going the shorter way, not by being quicker with your thumbs.
- Every seat presses Ready; when the last one has, a three-second countdown runs and the race begins for everybody at once.
How a race ends
- The first runner to reach the exit wins. Two runners arriving in the same millisecond share first place.
- Once somebody is out, the others have thirty seconds to finish: that is the deadline, and a runner still in the maze when it passes is placed by how many cells it covered.
- A resignation puts that runner out where it stands; the others race on.
Worth knowing before you start
- A dead end you can see into from a junction is not worth walking: the fog only hides what is round a corner.
- The other runners are somewhere in the same maze, but you cannot see where. The strip under the board shows how far each has run and whether they are out, and nothing else, because a runner's position would tell you about the maze.
- The hint, in a game against the bot, is what the strongest bot would do from where you stand with what you can see. It does not know the maze either.
Nothing moves in this maze but the runners, and the runners never meet. The maze is the same for every seat, and the seed that drew it is published at the end.
Maze Race terms
- A junction
- A cell with more than one way on besides the way you came. The sentence under the board says so when you reach one.
- A dead end
- A cell with no way on but back. Walking into one costs the way in and the way out.
- The fog
- Every cell you have not yet seen. The maze is there; you are not shown it.