Escher Cube Mazes

I’ve been thinking a lot about marble toys, as per usual, and started reflecting on the Perplexus. I think the Perplexus is one of the best toys ever invented. It’s beautiful to look at, easy to learn, hard to master, is self contained, and consistently fun. I also feel that designing a Perplexus-esque maze from scratch would be possibly the biggest nightmare known to man. So I started trying to think of ways to simplify the concept of “marble maze that traverses surfaces in 3 dimensions”. The first solution that popped out to me was to do 3 walls on the interior of a cube, with a bonus cube in the middle to add some transitional stages. Here’s little sketch of what I mean.

So I quickly made a little 3D sketch as a proof of concept in Fusion360 to print out. It wound up looking like this:

I thought this was a nice little thing maybe worth an “oh neat” sort of response, so I’ve been really pleasantly surprised by the enthusiastically positive response on my Instagram. I’ve gone ahead and modeled a far more ambitious version 2. This one has traps for the marble to fall into, dead ends, and a ball return at the bottom. It’s also mildly castle themed.

The slicer says it’ll take over a day to print (holy moly), so I will cross my fingers and hope this monster turns out perfect on the first try (unlikely), as a re-print will be costly.