Way Home
A free maze game that runs in your browser. There is a mouse, a few crumbs and a burrow, with hedges in between. Tap any square and the mouse walks the shortest way there, picking up whatever it passes. Collect them all, get home, and the next maze arrives on its own.
- Free
- No ads
- No account
- No download
- Works offline
- Single player
How do you play?
- Pick a board - Five by five with two crumbs, six by six with three, or seven by seven with four.
- Look at all of it - Everything is visible from the first frame. Nothing is hidden, so nothing has to be hunted.
- Tap a square - The mouse walks the shortest route there and never once goes through a hedge.
- Collect on the way - Any crumb the route passes over is picked up, whether or not you were aiming at it.
- Head for the burrow - Once the crumbs are gone, a tap on the burrow closes the maze and the next one deals itself.
About this game
Nothing moves until a child touches the screen. Nothing here can go wrong. Walk a silly route and the maze still ends at the burrow, it is simply not a perfect one, and only perfect runs feed the record.
Which leaves exactly one thing worth being good at: the order. We dealt 20,000 fresh mazes at each board size and compared every deal against its own shortest possible run, brute-forced over every order of the crumbs. Walking to the nearest crumb first, which is the move everybody makes, matched that shortest run on 92.7% of the small boards and on only 68.6% of the big ones. Take them in reading order instead and it falls to 44.6%. And on the big board the worst order of the same four crumbs costs 84.35 steps against a shortest run of 39.53, so deciding is worth more than the entire walk.
A tap names a place. Never a step. The mouse works out the route itself, so there is no joystick anywhere on this screen and nothing at all to hold down.
Now the part worth knowing before you hand it over. The small board is barely a maze. It is carved properly and then nine out of every ten dead ends are opened back up again, which leaves about a third of one dead end on an average deal, and in one deal out of ten every order of the crumbs costs exactly the same number of steps. That board is a garden with hedges in it, and it is meant to be. A three-year-old needs precisely that. An eight-year-old will be done with it inside a minute, so do not start them there.
What does it teach?
Ordering a job
Four crumbs is 24 possible orders and most of them are longer. That is about as much choice as fits in a head.
Reading a space
Before the tap you have to see that a route exists. Small-scale map reading, with no words in it.
Pausing before acting
Nothing moves until you touch it, so a second of thought changes the result immediately. That is rare in a game children actually like.
Living with imperfect
A wandering maze finishes exactly like a tidy one. Nobody is punished, and the next deal is right there.
Tips
The nearest crumb is not always first
It is the obvious move and it misses the shortest run on roughly a third of the big boards. Look at where the second crumb sits before you set off for the first.
Find the burrow early
Every run ends there, so a crumb lying in that direction is nearly free. One in the opposite direction wants collecting while you are still out that way.
Two crumbs, one walk
Crumbs on the same corridor come home in a single tap. Before you take the near one, check whether the far one is straight past it.
Watch the lit trail
The route stays lit for a moment after each tap. That is where a detour becomes visible, and it teaches more than anything else on the screen.
What age is it for?
3 to 4
The small board. Two crumbs, few hedges, and nearly every tap moves something along.
5 to 6
Six by six with three crumbs. The shortest run averages 24.41 steps, which is where order starts to pay.
7 and up
The big board: four crumbs, close to six dead ends per deal, and a perfect run that wants the whole board read.
Grown-ups
Go for a streak of perfect runs. Our nearest-crumb bot manages 68.6%, which is a fair thing to measure yourself against.
Accessibility
One tap per move. Nothing is dragged, nothing is held down, and there are no direction buttons that have to be pressed over and over. The mouse walks the whole route itself, so a player using an alternative input device, or a small hand that does not aim well yet, reaches exactly the same squares as anybody else. There is no clock and no countdown, so you can stop and think for as long as you like. The squares are large: on the biggest board they come out around 49 pixels on a 390 pixel phone, and a good deal larger on the small one. Every square is labelled with what is standing on it plus its own column and row, so a screen reader can tell forty-nine of them apart instead of reading the same thing forty-nine times. The whole game plays in silence without losing any information.
Playing together
Point before you tap
Ask which crumb goes first, then let them tap. A small child answers that with a finger, and that is already a plan.
One maze each
Take turns, a whole maze at a time, and count how many came out perfect. No clock, so nobody is hurried.
Guess the number
Before the first tap, guess how many steps it will take. Compare it with the counter afterwards.
Say where it has been
The mouse remembers nothing, so the story is yours. Who lives in the burrow, who dropped the crumbs, and why.
Common questions
Can you lose?
No. There is no clock, no lives and no move that ends badly. A wandering walk still finishes at the burrow, it just does not count as perfect.
Why did the mouse take a different route than I wanted?
Because a tap says where, not how. It always takes the shortest route between where it is and the square you touched. If you want a particular way round, tap a square in the middle first.
What counts as a perfect maze?
One finished in the fewest steps that maze allows. We work that minimum out per deal against every possible order of the crumbs, so it really is the minimum.
How many steps does a maze take?
The shortest run averages 13.58 steps on the small board, 24.41 on the middle one and 39.53 on the big one, over 20,000 deals. A mouse that always heads for the nearest crumb finishes the big one in 43.91.
Is the small board too easy?
Yes, deliberately. Nine in ten of its dead ends are opened back up, and in a tenth of deals every order costs the same. It was built for a three-year-old rather than an eight-year-old.
Is there an undo button?
No, and none is needed. No move can ruin a maze, only lengthen it. Restart deals a fresh board whenever you want one.
Does a child need to read?
Not a word. A mouse, some cheese and a house is the entire vocabulary. The row under the board shows the crumbs left as crumbs rather than as a number.
Is it free?
Yes. No payment, nothing to buy inside the game, and no larger paid edition.
Are there ads?
None. No banners, and nothing playing between mazes.
Do I need to download or sign up?
No. It runs in the browser, and after one visit it is stored on the device and works with no signal.
How is the record measured?
By how many perfect mazes were finished in a row, kept separately for each board size. One wandering maze resets the streak and takes nothing else away.