The History of Wall Maze
PaperGames's Wall Maze is our version of Quoridor: a modern abstract strategy game that turns a simple race across a grid into a genuine battle of wits, just by adding a handful of walls.
A 1990s Design
Quoridor was designed by Mirko Marchesi and first published in 1997 by the French game company Gigamic, quickly becoming one of the company's best-known titles alongside other compact two-player abstract games.
It belongs to a broader family of "blocking maze" games, where the board itself changes shape over the course of play rather than staying fixed the way a chessboard does - each wall a player places permanently reshapes the paths both pawns can take for the rest of the game.
Simple Rules, Real Depth
The entire rule set fits on a single card - move your pawn or place a wall, reach the far side to win - yet the tension between racing ahead and spending a turn to block your opponent instead gives it real strategic depth, and it's frequently cited in game-design writing as an example of elegant minimalism.
Quoridor has also been studied as a computer science problem: because the state space is large but well-structured (pawn positions plus wall placements, with a path-connectivity rule to enforce), it's a popular target for both traditional search-based AI and, more recently, reinforcement-learning agents.
This Version
PaperGames plays the standard rules on the standard 9x9 board with ten walls per player. Placing a wall is a small mode of its own: tap "Place a wall", tap anywhere on the board to preview the nearest legal wall there, and confirm - a deliberately forgiving target on a touchscreen, rather than needing to hit a precise spot.