Plainly Amazing
Written: Feb 14 '06 (Updated Mar 01 '06)
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Pros: Clever concept, no small pieces, ideal plane diversion, challenging for adults and kids alike.
Cons: Lose your concentration and you'll have to start over. Clicking sound may be annoying.
The Bottom Line: Surprisingly difficult at higher challenge levels. Engaging fun for avid puzzle solvers of all ages. Long attention span required. Great diversion for plane trips.
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| theeye's Full Review: ThinkFun Amaze |
In Which a Boy of More Than a Little Brain Amazes All Who Behold Him
It all began last spring with our astounding experience with ThinkFun's Rush Hour, Jr. puzzle. That was when we first truly understood that our five-year-old son was hopelessly addicted to puzzles. Not just any puzzles, mind you: ingeniously designed, multi-level brainteasers from a company which quickly became my favorite toy designer: ThinkFun (previously known as Binary Arts).
Flush with that success, I picked up a number of ThinkFun's more advanced solitaire puzzle games and found that, despite the suggested age range of 'eight and up' and a level of difficulty that would, in fact, challenge many adults, my precocious preschooler had no trouble grasping the concepts and had a great time working out the solutions. (You may perhaps have concluded that my game reviews are largely a thinly veiled excuse for maternal bragging. You would not be mistaken.)
So when I first spotted the Amaze puzzle on an on-line store, I was immediately intrigued. The product literature was not particularly helpful in visualizing exactly how the movable walls worked in this dynamic version of the classic labyrinth game, but my confidence in ThinkFun was such that I was willing to bet that my son would enjoy this brainteaser. Besides, I rather wanted to give it a try myself.
Is That All There Is to It?
Amaze diverges a bit from the typical ThinkFun formula. The entire puzzle is a single, self-contained, slim plastic unit. The stylus used for navigating through the inset paths of the maze is securely tethered to the puzzle and even the directions for setting up the sixteen separate challenges are conveniently printed on the back of the maze itself. There are no small pieces to lose and no cards to be spindled or mutilated. (A booklet of more detailed instructions and solutions to all the challenges is included, but not needed for routine play. Good thing, as you will lose it shortly.) At about eight inches square and less than an inch thick, the puzzle is easily tossed in a tote bag or -- more to the point -- shoved into the pocket of an airline seat. Even more so than the typical ThinkFun solitaire puzzle, Amaze is ideally suited for use as a travel diversion for kids and adults alike.
Of course, the most important quality of an effective travel diversion is not physical but conceptual. The most successful puzzles have deceptively simple rules and definitions but can be fiendishly difficult to solve. Amaze is no exception. The object of the game is easily grasped: guide the stylus through the maze from entrance to exit without lifting it up or jumping over walls. The maze isn't particularly large or complex and the task seems, at first glance, to be on the order of difficulty of the typical Help the Poor Kitty Find Her Way Home puzzle you'll find printed in any children's magazine or workbook.
But this is ThinkFun, so things aren't as simple as they seem at first glance.
Easy to Grasp, Hard to Describe
Remember those movable walls so confusingly described in the product literature? Once I had the maze in hand, it took all of two minutes to understand how the feature worked. Explaining it to you, though, may turn out to be simply a demonstration of the principle that a picture is worth a thousand words. Let's see if I can manage it in fewer.
Looking closely at the puzzle board, you will notice four narrow sliding bars running horizontally across the full width of the maze. Each bar can slide independently right or left by a fixed unit distance, carrying with it several segments of maze walls and thus changing the configuration of the maze. The movable wall segments are colored red to easily distinguish them from the fixed portions of the maze. On the left side of the board, each sliding bar ends with a red indicator button that lets you tell at a glance whether that slider is in its right or left position. Since each slider has two possible positions, there are sixteen possible starting positions for the maze. (I pause to allow you to do the math yourself. Really. It's good for you; do it.)
ThinkFun has cleverly designed the puzzle so that each of the sixteen possible starting positions is solvable, though some are quite simple to solve and some are mind-bendingly difficult. The starting positions are conveniently listed on the back of the puzzle in order of difficulty. To set up any of the challenges, use the stylus to push one of the wall segments on each slider to the right or left as needed.
Important user interface note: Since the starting positions are illustrated in terms of the indicator button positions, the natural temptation is to use the stylus to push those buttons right or left. You'll quickly find, however, that the buttons are installed flush with their channels and trying to push them directly will get you nowhere fast. What you need to do instead is to push one of the movable wall segments on the corresponding slider bar. Manipulating the puzzle is a breeze once you've figured this out, but I'm surprised at the uncharacteristically poor user interface design from the engineers at ThinkFun. Donald Norman, to whose The Design of Everyday Things I've previously adverted, would not approve.
I Feel the Earth Move Under My Feet
If sixteen different starting positions were all there were to this puzzle, it wouldn't be long before even a young maze-solver had plumbed its depths. To hold an adult puzzle addict's attention for any length of time, something more challenging, more dynamic, is clearly called for.
The key insight that makes Amaze so devilishly clever is that the movable walls can -- and, indeed, must -- be moved by the puzzle solver mid-solution. None of the mazes can be fully traversed without pushing one or more of the movable segments out of the way, thus reconfiguring the maze structure on the fly. The first two challenges require only one such adjustment each and are trivially easy to solve. But by the time you reach the sixteenth challenge, you'll need to push your way through movable walls no fewer than thirteen times, backtracking repeatedly in a circuitous route to the exit. (I know this because I peeked at the solution.)
What's more, moving a wall is not necessarily a reversible action. Once you've pushed a wall to the left, say, you'll need to get yourself over to the the other side of that wall segment in order to push it back to the right. And that may now be impossible: recall that each sliding bar carries with it several movable wall segments, which all move in tandem. Any change in the maze configuration may make a particular area of the maze unreachable.
But never fear. If you've locked yourself in and you can't remember what your last move was (not that you'd ever think of cheating by reversing it), all you need to do is reset the maze to the starting position, shake your fists and curse a little and start over. Once you've gotten past the first few relatively easy challenges, you'll be doing that a lot. Trust me. (Helpful hint: You may want to avoid playing with this puzzle within earshot of impressionable youngsters.)
The Play's the Thing
It's clearly a tremendously clever idea and design, but how does it play out in practice? Remarkably well, in my opinion, with just a few minor caveats.
Having tried out a lot of ThinkFun's puzzles over the past six months on my son, who is now five-and-a-half, I can say that this is the first puzzle in the 'eight and up' category which gave him some pause at first. It has only been in the last six weeks or so that he's really taken to it and had enough patience and determination to work out some of the solutions. He now frequently asks for it as a take-along toy.
The game works nicely as a distraction in venues where absolute silence is not required. Moving the walls back and forth unfortunately does generate an audible click, which makes it unsuitable in some situations.
To date, The Kid has solved the first seven challenges. Given the exponentially increasing level of difficulty, though, I fully expect that it will be years before he gets through all of them. (But watch this space for updates; he's surprised me before.) I would probably advise against getting this puzzle for a child under eight unless s/he's a particularly avid puzzle solver. ThinkFun has so many other solitaire puzzles that are more suited to the youngest, and easily frustrated, set.
The biggest difficulty younger players will have with this puzzle is one that will be shared by busy adults as well. This puzzle absolutely demands the player's complete, undivided attention at all times. Most of ThinkFun's puzzles can be abandoned for a moment if a distraction presents itself and then resumed when convenient. With Amaze, if you are distracted for a moment and let the stylus slip out of the grooved maze path, you'll find yourself faced with a nagging doubt: Was I really over there, on that side of the wall? Or did I let the stylus jump the wall in that moment while I wasn't paying attention?
Take my word for it: you'll never get past that nagging doubt and you'll find yourself resetting the starting configuration so that you can be sure that you're actually working on the challenge you intended to solve. This will happen when the phone rings. It will happen when your child asks you a question. It will happen frustratingly frequently when you are that close to solving one of the more difficult challenges. It will drive you crazy.
I can't help wondering if a clever designer might not have come up with a way of mitigating this problem. Perhaps a magnetized stylus running through a slightly deeper channel would have made it easier to ensure that a momentary distraction did not irremediably interrupt the solver's progress.
Unfortunately, ThinkFun seems not to have considered this issue and parents of small children and other incessant multi-taskers can all but forget about trying to solve all of these puzzles yourself. You just don't have a long enough block of entirely uninterrupted time to devote to it.
Unless, of course, you are planning a plane trip. We are, in fact, planning a plane trip soon and I plan to bring Amaze along. I'm bringing it, of course, as a distraction for The Kid, but if he doesn't want to work on it, I may give it a try. So far, I've only been able to work on (and solve) the first eight challenges; The Kid is gaining on me fast. If I can just manage to carve out some time to work on it, though, I'm sure I can solve all sixteen.
I expect it will be when The Kid goes off to college.
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Additional information and resources
Manufacturer's product page: http://tinyurl.com/826u9
The ThinkFun philosophy and history of the company: http://tinyurl.com/c557q
Other puzzle games from ThinkFun: River Crossing, Rush Hour, Jr., Roadside Rescue, Hoppers
Some multi-player games suitable for kids and adults alike:
Four Children's Card Games, Aquarius, Fluxx, King's Table (A Viking Game), The Game of Chips, Kill Dr. Lucky, Loco!
Some on-line resources for maze lovers:
Extraordinary Mazes, Educational Puzzles: http://www.amazeingart.com/
Clickmazes: Online interactive maze puzzles: http://www.clickmazes.com/
Another online maze puzzle: http://www.puzzle.ro/en/p_maze.htm
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 10
Type of Toy: Puzzle
Age Range of Child: 9 Years or Older
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Epinions.com ID:
theeye
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Location: New York, NY (it's a hell of a town!)
Reviews written: 66
Trusted by: 165 members
About Me:
Company president, math geek, first time mom at 39, epinion addict. Sleep? Not lately.
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