MEMORIES:
whitneyskywalker remembers...A friend gave me this at one of my more memorable birthday parties at the pool. I never got the ... More »
Posted on 01/08/07
CATCH PHRASE:
Manufacturer:
In ancient Crete, King Minos gave the legendary inventor and architect Daedalus the task of creating a place to house the fearsome minotaur. Daedalus responded with the labyrinth, a maze of twists and turns so overwhelming that anyone who entered was virtually guaranteed to become lost forever.
Many myths and millennia later, the labyrinth returned, this time on a much smaller though no less taxing scale. Created in the 1940s by Brio Toys, the single surface of the wooden labyrinth was really not much larger a foot square. Graced with small wooden walls, treacherous corners, and built in a way to give it a floating maze feel, the object of the labyrinth was to guide a single silver marble from beginning to end. This was done with the use of two knobs that controlled the vertical and horizontal tilt of the playing surface. As if that task alone wasn’t difficult enough, only the true masters of hand-eye coordination could skillfully steer the marble past the sixty traps dotting the board, small holes just large enough to swallow a marble and spit it out of a small opening in the side. In the labyrinth, one was both aided and afflicted by gravity.
To tempt and tease players, Brio painted the playing surface with various numerals to help them score their progress. Thus, like with golf, players could play against each other by “playing the course” over the course of various rounds. While fine motor skills are key, Labyrinth also tests a players concentration, and as noted most of all by Brio, patience. While not generally being a virtue favored among the young, Labyrinth nevertheless enjoyed a popular run.
As the decades have waxed and waned, little has changed in the Labyrinth itself. A circular version came out for a while with curved walls that stumped the original’s veterans for a time. Ravensburger released a version called 3-D Labyrinth where placers race each other to get to a particular treasure, moving walls as they go to help themselves and hinder the others. Still, it is a far cry from the technically challenging, ambidexterity-requiring, rocking and rolling Labyrinth developed by Brio Toys. Once moving along the path, it doesn’t seem to matter how many times a player is lost, the maze must be conquered. The difficulty and time investment combined would probably be enough to make even Daedalus proud.
