Have you noticed that some people are wizards at doodling, but go to pieces when perspective is involved? Others can do jigsaw puzzles starting from only one corner without breaking a sweat, but Ikea furniture is utterly beyond them.
This illustrates a simple point: things get a lot harder when an extra dimension gets involved.
Similarly, exact logic is a foreign country to many people. When they tell you to “think logically”, it’s almost certain that they’re requesting the exact opposite. You don’t want your child to grow up to be that person, do you?
This is where games such as this one come in. By teaching children that A always causes B and that they can use this fact to reach their goals, you’ll be setting them up for success.
A Brain Game Disguised as Toy
In this game, the idea is to assemble up to 9 hollow towers in a configuration that will cause the marble you drop at the start square to gradually fall to the endpoint.
The trick is that the towers are not only of different heights, but each is arranged differently on the inside, making it more difficult to figure out where the marble will exit.
Each puzzle, of which there are 60 arranged in increasing difficulty, is printed on a card showing where to place the starting tower, the destination square, and which other towers you can use to get from one to the other. The easier ones are really just an introduction to how the game and individual towers work, but the challenges quickly become much harder.
Design your own Marble Maze
Once you get the hang of it, though, the mystery disappears. Fortunately, you can still make up your own challenges and extend the life of this game – in fact, many will say this is where the fun starts.
All in all, the people from Think Fun Store really made a challenging game with this gravity maze.
Budding engineers a few years older than this game’s suggested 8 years and up, however, may be more intrigued by the Rush Hour game from the same company. This is less visually appealing, but a lot harder to wrap your brain around.
