.Available from Amazon
From the Introduction:
Inspired by my daughter-in-law, in mid 2014 I designed The Big Book of Little Princess Mazes. Although the mazes in the book could be enjoyed by either boys or girls, the title and story line of the book have little appeal to boys. Why not, I thought, use the same mazes with a different story line that would appeal to boys? However, once I started The Big Book of Little Pirate Mazes, I found that a story line was much easier to develop with a wider selection of maze designs. In the end only about one third of the maze designs in the Princess book were used in this one.
These books are the result of many years of development. In the 1990s I designed a maze construction set consisting of a group of computer programs that generate a variety of different types of mazes and a collection of typefaces that display these mazes in a wide variety of ways. Over the years I have designed many of these special typefaces, and it was to this collection I turned in preparing this book. Many of the mazes are built with tessellation patterns, patterns formed from a shape that fits together to fill the plane with no gaps. Several new maze fonts were designed especially for this book.
Although almost all maze books have a theme, few have a story that connects the mazes. Unlike a traditional storybook in which the story comes first and illustrations are added later, this maze storybook was constrained by the available designs. An alternative way to provide illustrations is with shaped mazes, but the small number of cells in these mazes limits that option.
There are no solutions provided but all the mazes are simple enough that even a child can solve them with patience. The key to solving them is trial and error－if one path does not work, try another, and since there are limited numbers of paths, you will eventually find the right one. (The same is often true in life.) The advantage of omitting solutions is that more pages of mazes can be included. The expected audience of this book is mostly boys old enough to control a pencil and young enough to enjoy adventure fantasies. Some mazes will be difficult for very young pirates.
If you are interested in other maze books or if you would like to know more about how these mazes were generated, visit my web page at ingrimayne.com/mazes.
I hope you have as much fun reading the stories and working the mazes as I had in writing and designing them. I apologize for any errors that remain.
Robert Schenk
July 2014