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Amazeing Journeys
Anna Nilsen
We are huge Anna Nilsen fans. Her mazes are visual feasts for the eyes and go way beyond the traditional line-based mazes that you may have grown up with. This volume is hard to find, but if you ever run across it, grab it! We were lucky to stumble over our volume on a close-out table at a local bookstore. It was our first experience with Anna Nilsen's mazes, and we've been on the lookout for her work ever since. Amazeing Journeys contains three maze books (that you can find separately at places like Mindware): The Great Race Maze, The Amazeing Journey of Marco Polo, and The Amazeing Voyage of Charles Darwin. Explore the Arctic, New York, the Amazon, Seoul, Sydney, India, the Dunhuang Caves, the Mediterranean, and many, many more places around the world as you climb ladders, scale mountains, fly in helicopters, traipse through spider webs and up and down the sides of a volcano, cross bridges, and even walk across the backs of tortoises trying to solve the thirty-six fully (and amazingly) illustrated mazes. Be prepared. These mazes can be tricky! [ISBN: 187700354-9 ]
Dinosaur Treks: Magnificent Mazes
Anna Nilsen and Douglas Palmer
Distributed by MindWare
Dinosaur Treks diverges from Nilsen's previous work and uses an interactive "jump through the pages" mechanism (also found in a few other recent Nilsen titles). Dinosaur Treks uses tabbed pages, each page featuring a specific dinosaur. You choose a dinosaur and then lead it through the book by jumping through open circles (time tunnels) and landing on colored circles (landing pads) on other pages until you reach the correct time period for your dinosaur. Then, pick another dinosaur, and start again! These are really doable mazes for even young maze solvers. [ISBN: 1-933054-17-4] (Available exclusively at Mindware.)
Magnificent Mazes
Anna Nilsen
Magnificent Mazes also uses the "time tunnel" and "landing pad" technique to move maze solvers back and forth through the various pages of the book. You get started by choosing a historical character (Leonardo da Vinci, Abraham Lincoln, Mozart, Cleopatra, Neil Armstrong, Homer, Marco Polo, Eric the Red, William I, Shakespeare) and following the mazes and the interactive dots until you reach the correct time zone (where you will also learn basic facts about the person). Like Dinosaur Treks, these mazes use the same kinds of illustration and varied pathways seen in Nilsen's earlier maze books. [ISBN: 1-892069-31-8] (Available exclusively at Mindware.)
Labyrinths: Can You Escape from the 26 Letters of the Alphabet? : Maybe...but First You'll Have to Find Your Way In!
Philippe Mignon
This is a beautiful A B C maze book. Each page features a wonderfully illustrated maze that somehow depicts (either through positive or negative shape, color, or the lines of the maze itself) the shape of a letter of the alphabet and featuring an object that begins with that letter. For example, "A" is for "Alligator," "N" is for "Narwhale," and "V" is for "Volcano." Each maze is introduced with a introduction related to the object. These are tough mazes, but they are beautiful and fascinating. The first level of love for this book with our maze solver was in "seeing" each "letter" in the shape of the maze in each picture. This is a maze book I think we'll return to for years to come. [ISBN: 1-55297-579-7>]
Magical Mazes
Juliet and Charles Snape
Another beautiful maze book, you and your child will delight in the wonderful illustrations and in the adventure of solving each double-page maze spread. These mazes are appropriate for younger maze solvers. Find your way through the mushroom houses to get to the tea kettle fairy's house for a party, swim through the seaweed and ocean life to help the mermaid get home, help the Elmtree Elf find the stolen treasure in the Gnome King's hideaway, and so on. The ten mazes are bright, colorful, feature large and well-spaced pathways, so they are perfect for finger-tracing. [ISBN: 0-8109-2926-0]
Magical Forest Mazes
Don-Oliver Matthies
You won't find the kind of lush illustration and wide-ranging maze-solving technique used by Nilsen and the Snapes, but the mazes in Matthies' books are good basic mazes related to certain themes and are perfect for young maze solvers. Many of the mazes are traditional line mazes, although there are some variations. [ISBN: 140271758X ]
Brain-Tingling Mazes
Patrick Merrell
These mazes are more simplistic than those of Nilsen and Snape, but the mazes themselves (there is not really any background illustration) are bright, colorful, and engaging. There are numerous line mazes, but your maze solver will also have fun with spaghetti-type mazes, arrow mazes, and other variations on the traditional. [ISBN: 1402718772
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Rush Hour
Rush Hour is a fantastic puzzle game, and the fact that there are (currently four) expansion packs means you'll get a lot of use out of it. Before finding Rush Hour, we had a similar game for use on our handheld called, Traffic. Rush Hour is the same principal, but it's very well executed. It comes with a set of plastic cars that occupy either two, three, or four squares on the base of the game (the grid). You set up the cars based on one of the puzzle cards. Then, by sliding cars either up or down (depending on their orientation in the setup), you try and free a path for your own car to get through the traffic jam and exit the free space on the right side of the base. The basic game comes with 40 cards of increasing difficulty. Each expansion pack comes with new cards and a new car that the new cards employ. It's a wonderful game. Rush Hour's small size also makes it perfect for travel (either in-transit or in-hotel), and it's well designed with a slide-out drawer on the bottom to hold the cards. Our only wish is that they'd included a better, more sturdy "cover" for the game or a carrying bag (like the "Railroad" version and River Crossing).
There is also a Rush Hour Junior using the same principals but specifically targeting the younger audience as sovlers try and get the ice cream truck through the traffic before the ice cream melts!
Animal Fan?
Check out the latest variation on Rush Hour, the Safari Rush Hour Game -- guide your Safari Rover through the jungle of hungry animals!
River Crossing
River Crossing is another great game from ThinkFun and features some of the same design features: a slideout drawer for the cars and individual cards for each new challenge (and increasing levels of difficulty). In River Crossing, you're trying to get a hiker across the river by creating a pathway using available logs of varying sizes. The hiker's boots are magnetic and "stick" to the logs, enabling him to pick logs up and move them into position in a nearby space so that he can slowly make his way across the board.
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