About Micro Mouse

Micro Mouse is a free browser racing game. You drive a tiny robot through a maze against the clock, and everyone gets the same maze each day.

Two ways to play

The daily maze is new every day and shared by every player, with a worldwide leaderboard and medals for the top ten. The levels are 45 fixed courses across five worlds, each worth up to three stars:

• Launchpad. Five quick courses that teach driving, drifting, boost pads and ice.
• Workbench. Clean floors to learn how the robot handles.
• Cold Storage. Ice that slides and mud that drags.
• Fast Lane. Boost pads and every surface at once.
• Night Shift. The big 8 by 8 mazes.

How the mazes are made

Each daily maze is generated from the date, then checked before anyone races it. Corridors are all the same width and walls run straight. Most mazes have more than one route, and every fork is tested so both paths stay worth taking: a longer path has to make up for it with fewer turns. Ice, mud and boost pads only go where they make a route more interesting. If a patch would just make one route worse, the generator leaves it out.

Fair times

Every time on the board is measured by our server, not your device. The game records your controls on each step, and the server replays them through the same engine to time the run. There's more on this on the daily maze page.

The real micromouse

Micromouse is a real robotics contest that has been running since the late 1970s. Builders make small robots that have to find their own way to the center of a maze with no help from anyone. The classic maze is 16 by 16 cells, each 18 cm square. A robot usually explores first to map the maze, then makes timed runs along the fastest path it found. The best ones finish in a few seconds and corner so hard they use suction fans to stay on the floor.

This game skips the mapping. You can see the whole maze from the start, so the race is all about driving.

Where to play

Micro Mouse runs in any modern browser on a computer, phone or tablet. There's nothing to install and no account to make. It's free, made by a small independent team.

Contact

Found a bug, have an idea or want your data removed? Email [email protected].