A-maze-ing Marbles

Aug 4

A hand-held Marble Maze rests on a coffee table

The CNC milling machine has sat in the corner of the MAKE studio feeling neglected and under-used. That changed today with our first prototype of a hand-holdable marble maze. We supersized the classic dentist office toy and brainstormed some ways to keep the simple design while increasing its replay value and engagement.

We dug into the scraps of plywood we had lying around the studio and glued up a couple of panels to create a thick enough stock to carve some marble deep channels in the wood. The plywood wasn’t perfect, but after filling a few voids in the stock with some spackle, we had a working prototype maze. An issue with mazes, is that once they’ve been solved, the maze becomes far less fun to continue playing. How can we add more objectives and guidelines for a player to navigate without writing out pages of rules for a player to read first? We played around with a few ideas. By adding more marbles into the mazes, we create distractions, competition, extra variables to control, even add the possibility of more than one player playing at a time. By including multiples sizes of the marbles, we can make use of their differentiated capabilities to add more complexity to the game. Lastly we played around with adding labeled markers around the paths of the maze to create check points for the marbles to hit.

We left the precise rules of the game up to each player, but we placed three different colored marbles in each with three different color coded destinations. We believe this open approach to game play will encourage better engagement from a range of audiences. With the marbles sealed into the maze with a plexiglass sheet bolted onto the wood board, the maze is ready to occupy our lobby. Any one who plays the game can help us improve future versions by sharing their feedback by scanning the small QR codes we placed inside the mazes.

Are you into mazes too? Check out this other maze project we made earlier!