Jigmaze Puzzle

When I ran across this Jigmaze Puzzle in a vintage issue of Games & Puzzles Magazine, I knew it was destined to be one of my Puzzles of the Week.

I found the Jigmaze Puzzle in the May 1976 issue of Games & Puzzle Magazine. One of my hobbies is looking through old puzzle books and magazines in search of new (new to me, at least) puzzles that I can use with my students.

My students prefer puzzles with pieces that they can move around as they solve the puzzle, so this jigmaze puzzle was perfect for them.

The goal of the Jigmaze Puzzle is to arrange the nine cards into a three-by-three square so that a maze is created. The maze will begin in one corner and end in the opposite corner. There will be several loose ends, but no part of the line will be completely detached from the rest. Additionally, no line will go off the edge of the large square.

I recreated the Jigmaze puzzle cards in Microsoft Publisher, and I formatted them in two different sizes: nine cards which print on a single page and jumbo sized cards which print on their own individual pages.

I printed the large cards to add to my puzzle of the week board in my classroom.

I printed the jigmaze cards on regular copy paper, laminated them, cut out the squares, and added magnets to the back of each piece. I use ceramic disc magnets with all of my puzzles. I buy the magnets in bulk from Amazon.

They are reasonably priced and strong enough to hold things up without them sliding down the dry erase board. I’ve used almost 400 of these magnets in the past year or so.

The magazine claims that there is only one solution to this puzzle (ignoring rotations of the given solution.) One of my students found what appeared to be another solution, but I’m thinking now that he must have misinterpreted the line of instructions which reads “the maze will begin in one corner and end in the opposite corner.”

To be honest, I’m not even entirely sure what that means. Does opposite refer to diagonally opposite? Or opposite as directly across from?

I’m not too worried about it. I think as long as students can create a valid maze that doesn’t have disconnected pieces/lines going off the edge that I will count it as a solution.