Meet the Designer – One Card Maze – PAX AUS 2025

Each year, PAX gives me an opportunity to not only try new games but also meet the designers and creators behind them. The talent, ingenuity and brilliance of their creativity never disappoints. How can a simple playing card be a game all by itself?

This is the third instalment in my “Meet the Designer” series (Part one and two, if you missed them), and each conversation has revealed something unexpected, whether it’s the emotional spark behind a game’s concept or the obsessive detail poured into its mechanics. One Card Maze is no exception. It’s minimal, clever, and deceptively deep. A single card, a single puzzle, and yet it pulls you in like a full-blown escape room.

Andrew, the mind behind One Card Maze, shares how the idea took shape. From scribbles on scrap paper to a convention table surrounded by curious players, we talk design constraints, maze logic, and the joy of watching someone finally crack the path. This is a story about simplicity done right, and the kind of creative risk that only thrives in spaces like PAX.

Ben: Hi Andrew, you’re here with your one card maze game. I just had a quick look at it. What an awesome design and mechanic. I love how you get to twist the card around. How the hell did you come up with that? Where did that come from? 

Andrew: Well, there was this board game competition, and the rules of the competition were that the only component you could use is a single poker card, and the rules had to be on the poker card. 

I thought to myself, well, what can you do with a poker card? I listed a bunch of stuff, including flipping and spinning. That was basically it. I kind of made a maze out of it and used that flip in it. It worked for making that first phase, that big one you’ve played and then kind of went from there. 

We have 110 different mazes here with us today. We plan on probably ending up with 200 by the end of next year. 

Are you looking to create a box game with all those mazes, or as looking to sell them in blister packs?

We’re selling it just as sets, what we call wallets. Each set is a different difficulty, or it’s an expansion on an earlier maze. We will host our fourth Kickstarter next year, and we’re also going to be doing coasters and bookmarks. Also, greeting cards and a t-shirt. 

Flip the person randomly T-shirt? Is that how that works? 

We are working on it! 

I love that physicality. Is that something that you’ve tried before, that physical moving of the playing card or in this case, it’s also the playing board? 

It’s just kind of the nature of the game, using it to flip and spin. All from just holding it in your hand and doing it. 

Is this your first published game?

This is probably my first big game, yeah. 

What else have you done? What else has been published? 

I did another game before this, where it didn’t quite work, but I learned a lot about Kickstarter and the whole process. It was really valuable. 

After the first one, one of my mates, Simon, said, ‘We’ve got to do something’. So we teamed up. It was really successful. We did a print and play season first, which tested the market, kind of to test the waters. It was really good. So then we did our second season. We just finished our third season, and we’re doing our fourth next year. 

You’re also self-publishing? The proceeds from the first season helped to pay for the next and so on? 

Yeah, absolutely. 

How has Pax been this year for you? Is this your first time? 

Yeah. Our first time. We are super busy, it’s exciting. We sold out of all our stock early this morning. We weren’t expecting it to be that popular, but well, it’s really cool, awesome to be sold out. 

It’s a good problem to have. 

Yeah, yeah. It’s great that people have been going to our online shop now. 

Where can people find you? 

They can find us at onecardmaze.com. You can shop online. If you sign up to our email, you can get some free mazes. you can print at home yourself. There’s also some free mazes online, you can actually play online. You can play on your laptop or on your phone. You lock the screen on your phone and you use your phone to spin the card and you swipe to flip. It’s pretty cool. 

Well congratulations on your first Pax and for selling out. 

Thank you.

One Card Maze

One Card Maze uses unique symbols to help navigate the maze or challenge before you.

Arrows pointing up mean a door is open and you can travel through it. Passages continue from one side of the card to the other, allowing you to flip the card over (long or short edge). And a ‘spin’ symbol allows you to change the orientation.

The image below is two sides of a card together – imagine the middle line is a fold. As you start, you can travel from door 1 (as the arrow points up), but you can’t go through door 2, as it points to the left. At 3 , there is a spin symbol so you can rotate the card so door 2 points up and allows you to go through. At 4, you flip the card over, allowing you to travel to the other side. And so on until you reach the end. 

The unique gameplay and ability to create more complex puzzles, which require flipping the card multiple times to reach the goal, make this concept challenging. 

I can see this being a time-based game between friends or a brain teaser to keep those neurons firing. 

I’m keen to print off some of these sample cards and challenge the family and my gaming group.

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