Revomaze Red Extreme

[Disclaimer: don’t read this post if you haven’t solved your Red Obsession or Extreme yet and if you don’t want it spoilt for you … this post will kill it for you, totally, I’m not kidding – you cannot read this post and not have it spoilt – capiche?]

Revomaze Black Extreme

There’s a lovely story behind this Revomaze – it doesn’t form part of the main series of puzzles and was only issued in a limited edition of 20 puzzles.

The story goes that one of the engineers who manufactures bits of these puzzles was chatting to Chris (the designer / MD of Revomaze) and came to realise that Chris would never experience the pleasure of getting to solve one of these puzzles, since he always knew what the maze would look like… he also recognised that up until then (Blue and Green time frames) Chris had stuck to orthogonal mazes … so he issued a challenge to Chris to solve a maze that he’d create specially for him … and thus the first Revomaze Black was born. 

Chris duly opened it and was amazed – firstly by some of the odd things that happened in the maze – there were curves and odd angles everywhere which made it a sod to map out and there were a couple of really tricky little areas to defeat – and secondly when he looked at the core, because staring back at him, writ large, if diagonally around the core, was the name of his company staring back at him …

Recognising that this was too good a puzzle not to release to the puzzling public, Chris commissioned a limited run of 20 available on a first come first served basis.

They sold out quickly.

We’ve all gone through the same process of wonderment seeing the core for the first time and seeing that name staring back at us … and comparing that to our maps and thinking, “No ways did we suspect that was in there …”

These days the Black is only available in the Obsession range – so puzzlers don’t get to see their cores – unless they register an open Black puzzle and read the Open Black Forum where we have posted pictures of the Extreme core – I still get a kick out of folks’ reaction the first time they see what’s happening in there …

Revomaze Bronze Extreme

Bronze Changes Everything!

As I alluded in my Revomaze mapping notes, I got to know the first part of my Bronze very, very well. I perfected my mapping techniques and gave myself very sore hands for several months while I worked out what the heck was going on in there.

Bronze has a couple of nifty little tricks to slow you down, like an area dubbed the ‘swimming pool’ that takes a little thought to work out how to get out of out of it and back to the main area of the puzzle. [This is the first time that you find yourself evidently trapped in the puzzle with no obvious means of resetting … and it can be a bit unsettling at first.] It also throws a few non-orthogonal paths and curves at you … and if you’ve perfected a technique for mapping that relies on straight lines, and ninety degree corners, that can be a bit disappointing!

OK, so following the usual strategy of exploring and mapping everything, leaves you locked in the first quarter of the maze … getting out requires new thought and I found that staring at an accurate map of what you do know, to be about the only strategy … that and occasionally trying crackpot theories that come to you in the middle of the night. During the course of those experiments, I managed to break the maze … yip break it … in fact I moved an entire wall a mill or two right, effectively blocking the corridor on the other side of it … having established that I’d gubbed it (good Glasgow word that!) courtesy of a mate on the Revomaze forum, I confessed to the manufacturer and sent it off to him for repairs – he promptly sent me a replacement, for free, even though I’d unquestionably broken his creation … that made me feel really bad.

About half an hour after receiving the new puzzle, I’d opened it – I’d worked it all out, but my enthusiasm (and yes, it must have been rather extreme to have wrought damage like that in there – I’ve seen the pictures! – It’s a bronze shaft, milled and then nickel-plated, and I moved a wall!!) had stopped me from getting out … a really good puzzle – the progression on this one will really open your mind.

Lesson from the Bronze: sometimes things change … (!)

Revomaze Green Extreme

Green is the second in the series of Revomaze Extreme puzzles. On the outside, apart from the colour of the sleeve, there’s no difference at all from the Blue … inside, that’s not quite true.

The Blue is a reasonably straight-forward maze, you always know when you’ve done something wrong, and resetting back to the start of the maze becomes second nature.

In the early versions of the Instruction cards there was a subtle difference between the one that came with the Blue and the one that accompanied the Green. Basically the Blue instructions said that when you hear the click, you’re in a trap and you need to reset the puzzle; whereas the Green changed that to you may be in a trap. That turns out to be a pretty important little clue or realisation.

Having spent some time working your way through the Blue, you get conditioned into resetting whenever it goes click, but doing that on the Green, effectively traps you in the first quarter of the maze, forever … and working out how to get out of there requires a lot of really fine observation skills, or a reasonably decent ability to map what the maze looks like. While you can get away with not actually drawing a map of the Blue, you’d need to draw a map of at least part of the Green to work out how to defeat its new trick. Once you’ve worked out what you need to do form your picture, a reasonably steady hand should see you through to the second half of the puzzle, and that’s pretty straight-forward.

Once again, getting the two dots to line up and releasing the pins opens the puzzle and gives you the second part of the Series Code map and a certificate from the maker.

Having solved the Green, you realise that there’s a definitive progression to this series of puzzles: Blue introduces the concepts and teaches you that you can’t always simply follow a wall in a maze. Green builds on that and teaches you the importance of space, and negative space, and how useful maps can be.

Some thoughts on mapping Revomazes:

I suspect that if you ask 5 puzzlers who’ve solved these things whether and how to map a puzzle, you’ll get six answers. These are my thoughts; I’ve found the methods useful, if you find it useful, great, if you don’t, also great – as long as you enjoy the puzzles!

• Mapping in your head – i.e. relying on (muscle) memory for everything will be fine for the Blue and many people swear by it … it does need a bit of visualisation and a decent memory, but it’s certainly feasible.
• Scribbling notes – my method for Blue involved a list of arrows in various directions representing moves, annotated with notes (“beware right, there be dragons!” or “ease around corner to left”) – it worked OK, but quickly falls flat on the Green.
• Freehand maps – using some sort of colour coding for walls, paths and traps – this is quite effective and will probably be good enough for most of the series, as long as you pay careful attention to some areas and map them fairly accurately relatives to markings on the sleeve and the core (the core has a serial number engraved on it which can provide a handy depth reference).
• Measured mapping – I started drawing pretty accurate maps from the Bronze puzzle – mainly to make sure that I wasn’t missing something obvious – this involves measuring depth of the core in / out of the sleeve (using a calliper in my case) and accurately measuring rotation of core relative to the sleeve – I use a bit of masking tape around the end of the core (actually on a trainer handle, if you have one) marked in millimetres as a measure of rotation – then drawing what you can ‘see’ on graph paper. Once you’ve solved one of them, you know how big the maze-universe can be and that gives you clues as to where you should look to go next, sometimes.

Revomaze – Blue Extreme

[Disclaimer – while I may be a moderator on the Revomaze forums, I’m not affiliated with the company in any way – I am a very big fan of their puzzles though!]

This is a brilliant puzzle – I can’t honestly remember where I first stumbled across these puzzles, but it must have been somewhere in the course of my surf-err-research on the inter-web…somewhere, someone had said they liked the puzzle, so I had a look at their website and it looked intriguing. Physically it’s a nice looking puzzle – the sleeve is machined aluminium anodized blue and the core is nickel-plated – these puzzles mean business, weighing the best part of three quarters of a kilo (look it up, it’s a measure of mass!) – don’t drop them on your toe…you’ve been warned.

The premise is simple – there’s amaze inscribed on the shaft inside the blue sleeve. There’s a sprung pin inside the sleeve that engages the maze. Navigate the pin through the maze to the end – when a dot in the shaft is exposed and lined up with a dot on the sleeve. Mazes are simple – left hand on the wall, follow to end – simple! Well, not really – there’s a clue in the fact that the pin is sprung. The maze has tracks at differing levels, so falling off a track into a trap sends you back to the start again – and that spring makes sure that if you don’t follow the correct path, you will fall into a trap, every time!

Now at this point I should probably admit that starting this puzzle properly took me a couple of weeks, and I only really got my head around the first problem after I’d lent it to a mate and he showed me something important…engaging the maze is simple: rotate shaft anti-clockwise until it goes tighter (the pin is climbing up a ramp in the start ring) and then push the shaft outwards – first move complete, you’re in the maze … from there there’s only one way to go, so you follow the path … only to find the first trap – CLICK as the pin drops into the trap trench – the shaft feels a bit looser, and from there the only way out is back to the start ring. I’d done that a hundred times before I took it into the office and let Andy (he of the mini Japanese puzzle box-fame) play around with it. He showed me that after the first few bends, you had to be really careful when you went around the next corner, slamming it from one corner to the next will simply drop you in a trap, but if your finesse it around that particular corner, you don’t fall into the trap … that was the breakthrough that I needed – get yourself out of the mind-set that blind mazes like this are simple two dimensional maps wrapped around a cylindrical core – you can’t just follow a wall and find the end (and boy is that true at one particular spot in the this puzzle!).

You need to map out (in your mind, or on paper if you’re like me) all that you can ‘see’ in there and work out a strategy for getting all the way through the maze to get the shaft out … trust me, once you see the two little dots lined up, release the pins and take the core out exposing the maze for the first time, you will love this puzzle. Seeing the maze cut into the core and understanding what it is you’ve been feeling through the pin all the way around is absolutely tremendous – it’s really beautiful to see the machining in there and appreciate how fine the tolerances really are for all that to work … once you open the puzzle there’s a hidden compartment inside the shaft that contains a unique certificate (so you can prove that you’ve opened it) and part of a maze printed on acetate – which will form one part of a 5-part map providing a series code – first person to crack the series code wins a cash prize (around £5000 at the moment). Blue is the first in the series … followed by Green, Bronze, Silver and (still to be released) Gold.