#83 Reconfigurable wall ball maze game

Gotta keep things lively for the youth

I discovered wall ball maze games this past fall. It’s a simple but clever concept.

You have a board roughly 1 meter wide and 2-3 meters tall. It’s mounted nearly vertically with a slight tilt away from the player. The board has many sections cut out, but there is a continuous if convoluted path from bottom to top. There is a ring suspended from two cords that go through eyelets or pulleys mounted above the top left and right corners of the board. You place a golf ball in the ring. The object of the game is to pull on the other ends of the cords to manipulate the ring carrying the ball along the path to the top. If you make a mistake and move the ring in front of a void, the ball will roll into it and fall to the bottom.

It’s a good game. It’s also static. The layout and decoration and a one-time kind of thing, so there’s limited variety. What if you could make it more dynamic? More dynamic means appearance and, well, holey-ness. Appearance is easily solved with LEDs. Holey-ness is a little more complicated.

One method would be to have the entire playing surface be broken up into hexagonal rods, the faces of which form the playing surface. Maybe each one would be about 6 inches deep. You can manipulate them from the rear by either pushing a rod out or pulling it back in. The rods that protrude form the traversable surface, and where the rods are recessed there are the voids you’re trying to a-void.