Revomaze Aqua V1 - Chris Pitt

My first foray into the Revomaze world was back in 2009 when I tormented myself with the Blue version.

I thankfully had help in eventually solving it from fellow puzzle solver Brian Pletcher.  The satisfaction of finally being able to examine the interior of the maze is not to be taken lightly, it’s quite the rush!

Now that brings me to this Aqua version more than a decade later.

Puzzlewanderer has an excellent blog on this puzzle, here’s an excerpt:

https://explorepuzzles.com/en/revomaze-review-rhapsody-intro-aqua/

“The appeal, beauty and complexity of Revomaze, is the mechanism.

It took me a while to understand it from reading at first, so pay attention to the details.

How it basically works, is you have an aluminum sleeve.

In the sleeve, there is a springed metal pin.

We’ll get back to this pin later, so try to remember it.

Inside the sleeve it looks like there are two metal bolts, one from each side.

In fact, this is actually a rod, also called the shaft, or the core.

Around this shaft there is a cut maze.

Here is when things get interesting.

The maze is cut in different depths, resulting in many layers, or heights, of the maze.

Remember the pin we talked about at the beginning? Good.

That pin navigates the maze. It is static inside the sleeve, while YOU rotate, push and pull the shaft.

And because the pin is springed…

If you navigate the pin from a high path to a lower path, you cannot go back the same way.

This is called a trap, from which your way is back to the start!

All of this may still sound simple to you. Let me clarify –

Everything is completely hidden from you.

You can’t SEE the maze itself, only feel it.

Your goal is to navigate your way through the unknown maze, until the shaft reaches it’s ending position (shown in picture).

Then you can remove the shaft and see with your eyes what exactly was in the maze and how it looks like.

Because of this intricate and unique mechanism, the Revomaze actually incorporates elements of the Maze and Dexterity puzzle types.

Revomaze Aqua is the easiest puzzle in the series.

It was released because the original easiest Revomaze in series, Blue, was reported as too hard as a first puzzle.

Yeah, you heard me right.

The easiest puzzle in the series was too HARD.

Even though I did Aqua after I’ve solved several, much harder Revomazes, there still were some parts that got me thinking.

Let me tell you this –

The maze itself is brilliant.”