Maze Chase

You can play whichever way is comfortable:

• On a computer: use the four arrow keys to steer. Press N to start, P to pause, and S for sound on or off.
• On a tablet or phone: tap the four big yellow arrow buttons under the board to steer, and use the Start, Pause and Sound buttons.

Your runner keeps moving in the last direction you chose, so you only need to tap a turn at each corner — no need to hold a button down.

Most games on this site are calm and untimed. Maze Chase is different — it is a real arcade game, so the ghosts move and there is a bit more hurry. There is still no sign-up, no pop-ups, and you can pause any time. If you would rather take it slow, try Sudoku, Mahjong Solitaire, or Word Search — or browse all of our free games.

This is an open-source HTML5 maze-chase engine (daleharvey/pacman), used under its permissive licence and hosted here so it loads fast, plays offline-friendly, and shows no third-party adverts inside the game.

Tips that actually help

• The ghosts in this version do not hunt you. At every opening each one chooses at random whether to turn or carry straight on. There is no pattern to read, so watch the openings around them instead of trying to guess their intent.
• A ghost can never turn round in a corridor. It only ever changes direction into a side passage. So a ghost that has just gone past you in the opposite direction is no longer your problem: the danger is always what comes out of the side openings ahead of you. The one exception is the instant you eat a power pill, when every ghost turns round at once.
• You can turn round and they cannot. Pressing the opposite arrow reverses you instantly, anywhere along a corridor, not just at a junction. If a ghost appears in front of you, go back the way you came — it is the single most useful thing to know here.
• Press your turn early. The game remembers the direction you asked for and takes it at the first corner where it is possible, so you do not have to time the press to the exact moment you reach the opening.
• You and a ghost move at exactly the same speed, so you can never outrun one in a straight line. Every bit of distance you gain is gained at a corner.
• Save the power pills. The eight seconds run down whether there is a ghost near you or not, so eating one with the maze empty around you wastes it. Wait until two or three ghosts are close together, then take it and chase them: the first ghost is worth 50, the second 100, the third 150 and the fourth 200. All four on one pill is 500 points, as much as fifty dots.
• A ghost you eat is not sent back to the middle in this version. It goes dark, moves at double speed for three seconds, and is then dangerous again wherever it happens to have got to. Eat one and move away from that spot rather than following it.

Playing Maze Chase comfortably

This is an arcade game and it does not wait for you. The ghosts move the whole time you are on the board, and a touch from one costs a life. That suits some people and not others, and there is nothing wrong with deciding it is not for you: Sudoku and Mahjong never hurry anybody. One thing here is gentler than the arcade machines it comes from, though: this version does not speed up. Level 2 runs at exactly the same pace as level 1, and so does level 10. Only the dots come back.

The controls are built for fingers as well as keys. Under the board are four large yellow arrow buttons, big enough to hit with a thumb without looking, and above them three labelled buttons: Start / Restart, Pause, and Sound on/off. Each does exactly what the matching key does, so you can mix the two. You press a direction once and your runner keeps going until you turn it or a wall stops it, so nothing has to be held down. After you lose a life there is a countdown from five before anything moves, so you are never dropped straight back into the maze.

Pause is a proper stop: the maze freezes, the word Paused appears, the sound stops and the keys do nothing until you press again, so you can leave a level half finished. Sound is on when you arrive and the small letter s below the board is green; turn it off and it goes red. That choice is remembered on this device. Nothing else is kept — your score and level go as soon as you reload the page. Focus mode, above the game, hides the rest of the page; the Text size button enlarges the writing around the game but not the maze, which draws its own picture inside its own frame.

If something is not working

Where Maze Chase came from

The dot-eating maze game arrived in Japanese arcades in 1980, and what made it new was what it left out. Arcades then were full of shooting, and its designer set out to make a game with none in it — one that the people the arcades had ignored, women in particular, might actually want to play. Eating replaced firing. It became the most successful arcade game ever made, and within a couple of years the maze, the dots, the four coloured pursuers and the pill that turns the chase around had been copied on to every home computer of the era.

One thing has changed, and it is worth knowing before you start. In the 1980 machine each of the four pursuers had its own way of hunting: one gave direct chase, two tried to get in front and cut you off, and the fourth alternated between chasing you and wandering away. Players who learned those habits could work a maze for hours on one coin. The open-source engine used here does not reproduce any of that — its ghosts simply choose at random at each opening, and the original author left a note in the code saying that proper ghost behaviour was still on his list. In practice that makes this version less predictable and, in stretches, kinder. Nothing here will hunt you down and refuse to give up. But nothing here can be learned by heart either, so you cannot memorise a safe route.