For the first stretch of building GridJoy, “puzzle” meant “grid of numbers.” Sudoku, Kakuro, Calcudoku — fill cells, obey constraints, no guessing. A maze didn't really fit the brief. Most of a maze has no numbers in it at all.
I built one anyway. And not an easy one — I started with a hex maze, the honeycomb kind, because apparently I hate myself. That meant axial coordinates: a hexagon grid doesn't have tidy rows and columns, so every cell needs a little two-axis coordinate system and a wall model that knows six neighbours instead of four. I told myself it was a one-evening experiment. It was not a one-evening experiment.
AND THEN PEOPLE ACTUALLY LIKED IT
Here's the part I didn't see coming. The maze — the thing that barely fit the concept — was the one people kept mentioning. After a grid full of hard deductions, tracing a single quiet path from start to finish is a different kind of calm. No arithmetic, no contradiction-hunting, just “follow the corridor.” It turned out to be the palate-cleanser the numbers needed.
So the one-off became a family. And building the family meant admitting there are really two different things hiding under the word “maze.”
TWO KINDS OF MAZE, ONE CONFUSING WORD
The Number Maze is the odd one out: there the numbers are the puzzle. Each cell tells you how far to jump, and you plan a route of leaps to the exit. It looks like a maze but it thinks like a number puzzle — which is the whole reason it earned a place in a numbers app.
The wall mazes — square, circular, and that cursed hexagonal one — are the classic kind: no numbers, just walls and corridors, find the one route through. Same idea, three very different geometries. The circular one winds in rings; the hex one branches six ways at every junction. Each needed its own renderer, and each found a fresh way to be annoying.
IT LOOKED GREAT — UNTIL SOMEONE HELD A PHONE
On my screen, the mazes were lovely. On an actual phone, the controls were a small disaster. The HINT and RESET buttons had been squeezed into two cramped little squares off to the side, like an afterthought nobody had measured. Worse, on the Number Maze the HINT button had ended up stacked below the board — parked in the one spot a thumb never goes and an eye never looks.
This is the gap that gets every developer eventually: the thing works perfectly in the place where you build it, and looks broken the instant a real hand holds it. It solved fine. It just didn't fit.
THE FIX WAS BORING. THE LESSON WASN'T.
The repair was about as glamorous as it sounds: stretch the controls so HINT and RESET fill the row properly, side by side, where your thumb actually rests — and get the Number Maze's HINT out from under the board and back up beside RESET with the others. A few lines. Half an evening. The kind of change nobody will ever notice, which is exactly the point — they only notice when it's wrong.
The maze detour taught me the thing I keep relearning: a puzzle isn't finished when it's solvable. It's finished when it fits the thumb. The cleverest grid in the world is worthless if the buttons feel like they were bolted on in the dark.
Go get lost on purpose, then — here's how the mazes work, or just browse all eighteen types and pick a corridor. The ghost will wait at the exit.
— the (still-finding-my-way-out) dev behind GridJoy 👻