Website version of Christopher Manson’s 1985 puzzle book, « Maze »

This out of print book was from before my time, but Maze: Solve the World’s Most Challenging Puzzle by Christopher Manson was a sort of choose-your-own-adventure book that had a $10,000 prize for whoever solved it first. (No one did; the prize was eventually split up among twelve people who got the closest.)

I created a modern, mobile-friendly web version of the book.

GitHub (with Python source): https://github.com/asweigart/mazewebsite

Website: https://inventwithpython.com/mazewebsite/

Start of the maze: https://inventwithpython.com/mazewebsite/directions.html

There are 45 « rooms » in the maze. I created HTML image maps and gathered the text descriptions into a throwaway Python script that generates the html files for the maze. I didn’t want it to rely on a database or backend, just HTML, CSS, and a little Bootstrap to make it mobile-friendly. The Python code is in the git repo.

What My Project Does

Generates HTML files for a web version of Christopher Manson’s 1985 puzzle book, « Maze »

Target Audience

Anyone can view the output website. The Python code may be of interest to people who have similar one-off projects.

Comparison

The throwaway script spits out html files, making it easy for me to make updates to all 45 pages at once. It’s a one-off project that doesn’t use other modules, so it’s not supposed to be a web framework like Flask or Django or anything.