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I am incredibly blessed to have a whip-smart 7-year-old. He’s so engineeringly minded that it’s like living with a 1.2m version of my husband! If he can hold something, he wants to deconstruct it and find out how it works. And then build a better version!
The first time we gave him a maze to solve was an eye-opener. He told me he was going to run it backwards as it would be a quicker way to find the exit. He was 5! Still can’t find his socks in the morning (always on the shelf in his room!). Or see the milk when looking in the fridge (always in the same place!). But hey, we can’t be good at everything, right?!
Any-hoo, when I saw Gravity Maze, I knew it would be right up his street. As a big fan of marble runs and Rollercoaster Challenge, he loves grabbing pieces and using them to create his own designs – imagination and logic coming together in clever harmony.
And that’s what’s happening here in Gravity Maze!
Solo Session
The puzzle is touted as single player but there’s no rule against co-oping. And if you’re like me and not spatially minded, any help is a big help!
Marble Run
In the box there are 60 x challenge cards ranging from beginner to expert level. There’s also a grey 3D grid, 10 x 3D coloured towers of varying heights, and 3 x stainless steel marbles.
Each card shows a various number of coloured squares on a grey grid (corresponding with tower colours) and the red single storey target ower. Each tower also has a number of black dots on the top of each face (to help with orientation). Some cards even have double-coloured squares indicating some stacking is going to be needed. And some have extra lines on them indicating horizontal (rather than vertical) placement will be involved. Given the need for gravity, the marble won’t travel far in parallel, but it is still an essential element of some builds.
Inside the towers are plastic pathways that the marble will (hopefully!) run through when connected. The idea is to get the marble lopping through the various towers, landing in the red target. The towers click into place onto the 3D grid (and each other) using flanges, and you can pop them in and out, trying various configurations. There’s no time limit (although that could be added in if you really want to up the crunch!).
There are 11 rules that must be followed when building – all pretty intuitive stuff. But we did miss a couple the first time we tried it so our success induced smugness was short lived!
Coming Down To Earth With A Bounce
When we got the sequence correct, we found the marble flowed down from starting tower into the destination tower pretty smoothly. Maybe a bit of a bounce, but nothing major. If there’s a kink or a curve that send the marble the wrong way or your drop is too high (and against those rules mentioned above!), though, it can ping pretty far once it hits the deck! Luckily the reverse of each card contains the solution to that particular challenge. So all is not lost if you get stuck.
Thanks to the little flanges, the towers are also easy to click into place and out again. I initially thought the towers were made up of individual pieces, but they are fixed heights. (Just as well too, as I don’t need any more variables when trying to figure things out!)
The first few challenges are pretty basic – green beginner mazes to warm up your hands and your minds. But they quickly ramp up, particularly when you get into stacking and laying horizontal pieces! And although you’re effectively doing the same thing each time, the variability in terms of building a different construction sequence each time keeps it feeling fresh.
A-Mazing
I can’t say I have been much help, but I love watching our son hold the pieces and solve the challenges. My husband has got really into it too, so I do what I can, but mainly marvel at their maze-mindedness.
The replayability in Gravity Maze will depend in part on how good you are at mapping and remembering sequences. I have returned, Men-in-Black style, and can’t remember how I did the first one let alone any of the more complicated ones. But the challenges aren’t everything. Even more fun for my big and little man seems to be the opportunity to freestyle the design and use the pieces to make unique marble rolling structures. And that I absolutely love! Having engaging solo puzzles that our son enjoys is excellent for him and for me as a gaming parent. Having a game like Gravity Maze that fires the imagination as well as the logical parts of the brain is something extra special.
If logic, construction, and building are your thing, Gravity Maze is an excellent solo-able puzzle that will keep you engaged for hours!
