Rotating Arrow Mazes

1st September 2017

After designing the Variable Jumping Mazes I was thinking about whether it would be possible to add a similar type of state dependency to the standard arrow mazes, and came up with the idea for a new type of maze I've called Rotating Arrow Mazes.

It's a variant of the standard Arrow Mazes, but the addition of one or more rotation symbols makes it substantially trickier. The following simple example illustrates the idea:

RotateArrowDemo.gif 

Start on the arrow in the top left corner. From that arrow move to any one of the arrows it's pointing to, in the same row, column, or diagonal.

If you land on the rotation symbol, this behaves like the last arrow you landed on, rotated through a quarter turn (90°) clockwise, as shown by the arrow. 

Continue in this way, following successive arrows, and find the shortest route to the goal in the bottom right corner.

Here's the solution:

RotateArrowDemoSoln.gif 

The rotation symbol turns the standard arrow maze into a state maze in which you may have to visit some squares up to four times (as in the above example).

The larger versions of this maze can have two types of rotation symbol, which rotate clockwise or anticlockwise.

Got the idea? Now try your hand at this month's competition maze, Twister.


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