Customer Reviews

The Ultimate Maze Book

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This was a gift for my fiance'. He loves mazes and I was worried it would be too childlike. Not so. This book really spans all ages and skill levels.

This book was much too advanced for my 7 year old who loves mazes and usually masters them easily. This is geared more for an adult. Skip this for a kid, but an adult would love it.

This maze book is incredible! I bought it for Christmas for my twin boys. They each have been taking turns doing different pages, and they actually work together instead of arguing (like they do when they play our Wii!). There are the most intriguing 3-D mazes, and mazes with multiple levels and sides. A must have book for any child that loves do to mazes. My boys are 11, and it's not too difficult for them.

I purchased this maze book for my 70 year old father. I would say this maze book was designed for junior high to adult activity level. The visual 3-D architectural design is something not normally included in your every day maze book. For the price on Amazon this is an excellent purchase.

After the "maze craze" began in the 1970s (at least, when printed mazes became available in books and magazines in forms that were challenging enough for adult solvers), the standard maze forms were those that could be seen in the works of Vladimir Koziakin, in which a line is drawn between "walls" from one point to another.

These standard forms were quickly transcended by the groundbreaking works (in both a figurative and a literal sense, since he physically dug large mazes in the ground as well as drawing and painting them) of Greg Bright. Greg Bright's published works made widely available such innovations as "mutually accessible centers" (the spirals from which numerous paths intersect at their centers), geometric matrices, the "weave" in which illustrated paths are seen to cross over and under each other, mazes that contained no "dead-ends" (the difficulty arising from paths that keep looping back to ones already visited, rather than simply coming to a stop), and mazes that passed through pages and over the edges of pages (The Hole Maze Book).

Also in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the works of Larry Evans and Bernard Myers brought lavishly illustrated 3-D perspective mazes into popular books (Supermazes No. 1, Three-Dimensional Mazes) that expanded the standard maze into the forms of elaborate architectural structures, cities, grids, etc. in which rooms, bridges, etc. formed the pathways and in which these could cross over and under each other. Since that time, maze innovations have primarily occurred in the realm of video games. (At least one exception, by Christopher Manson, did not take the form of a standard illustrated maze, and thus stands in near-isolation.)

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Thus, it has been about 20 years since a published work has significantly expanded the form and complexity of the printed maze puzzle. This book seems therefore to be a landmark in the genre. While incorporating past elements of "weave" and 3-D architectural designs, Wadzinski adds (or at least formalizes) new rules regarding directional pathways and overpasses, multi-objective mazes, three-dimensional "cube" mazes, and (as found in numerous video game puzzlers) "key" mazes in which items are available to pick up and use to go through doors and find new pathways. For anyone who thinks they have seen it all before, this book needs to be looked at and tried out!!! The maze puzzle is alive and well!

My daughter has been burning through maze books. I was happy to find a maze book that was more of a challenge for her. She is 9 and some are hard and make her think and some are just fun to do. Would recommend to anyone that enjoys mazes.

The Ultimate Maze Book may not be the ultimate, but it is challenging enough for adults to enjoy. There are a lot of different kinds of mazes. The samples are always easy enough to understand. The actual mazes can be a little more challenging or a lot more challenging.

Be sure to use a pencil and have a decent eraser.

I bought this maze book for my young sons, but it was much too advance for them.

I liked the product that I ordered but it was meant more for a child instead of an adult. I returned the product free of cost and intend to order again. Pat Sever