The Moving Maze Puzzle

This is a great puzzle posted to Reddit by GM_Nate.

I translated the “Wall Game” into a labyrinth puzzle for use in a dungeon. PCs enter the dungeon room from the top; the next door at the bottom unlocks once the puzzle is solved.

The Rules:
Starting at the top right, walk along the dark gray pathway [thru colored areas that become walls when you pass thru them] until you get to the bottom left.

You cannot cross the same color twice in a row. (Red-blue-red is okay. Red-blue-blue is not.)

This image was made using assets from 2 Minute Tabletop. Feel free to make use of it!

This is great, but ordinary mazes are pretty frustrating in RPGs. A shifting-walls maze will be next to impossible, even if the players are given explicit instructions about how the walls (or impenetrable doors) work.

I suggest you have an NPC warn the players about “an impossible maze with moving walls” and then put them onto the scent of a map of the place, so they can devise a solution ahead of time. That should be a solid hook.

Have an NPC tempt the heroes with the idea of a certain treasure at the end of the maze but say “Alas, it’s impossible. The walls shift and block the passages as you go. Many have tried. The old sage Elkizara knows; she’s heard the tales.” And Elkizara sells them a map or offers to split the treasure and tells them the rules, revealing them as magical text with a detect magic spell.

But, is the map complete and correct? Who made it, after all? One of the creators/caretakers or–more likely–just one of the many unsuccessful raiders? One wall is marked “Blue? Red? Don’t remember.” So maybe the heroes assume one of those wrongly, so their solution won’t work, and they have to come up with a new solution there in the maze.

The Solution…

The solution is to use the loop near the lower left (with the blue wall on its left) to trace a path back to the red wall at the bottom. Numbering the tiles left to right and top to bottom… 8-1, 8-6, 6-8, 2-7, loop back to 6-8 again, 8-6, 6-5, wind up and left then down to 1-8.

Variations

Perhaps Elkizara doesn’t know the rules, and it’s left to the heroes to discover them by casting detect magic themselves, perhaps prompted by something Elkizara or another NPC said. Or they get the rules and the map from two different sources. This would explain why no one else has had the success the heroes will have.

Perhaps there are traps or guardians in some passages. After all, certain passages aren’t needed to successfully complete the maze, so they could have deadly traps the creators wouldn’t have to worry about.

Some passages can have steps up or down, debris, graffiti, or–if it’s lower than surrounding passages–be partially flooded.

And/Or give them hints of possible treasure in areas where they don’t need to go if they’re just solving it. So then they can rethink their solution to include some of those locations.

For example, “Here lies the body of Hulbert, who fell in a pit, taking his wonderful wand with him. We left him when we failed, we wretches of friends.” Maybe that’s not written on the map but scrawled on the wall at the entrance, with the ironic title “Tomb of Hulbert”. That way, the heroes have to devise an alternate route there in the maze to find Hulbert’s pit.

Or, do the walls move by some other rule? Or not at all (and it’s just a normal maze with treasures in certain unneeded passages)? Or is there a way to disable the walls from moving entirely? Or a way to trigger the walls to open on a command word or with a magic item?