Perplexus is a series of ball-in-a-maze puzzles invented by Michael McGinnis. What sets it apart is its wildly three-dimensional structures that encourage large rotations of the course's shell, awareness & control of which lane gravity is perpendicular to, and maneuverability of the steel ball through various edges that lead it into the wide space below.
Each course has a start and end point, many have obstacle number labels to help you keep your... bearing... through the lengthy challenges, and there are certain practice points for you to start from if you're having trouble going all the way through.
Originating from a prototype called Equilibre Hable, McGinnis' passion for 3D mazesnote spurred him to work on the Superplexus model, whose course design was reused for the wider-selling Perplexus brand. In 2016, two courses designed by PlayMonster were released. Spin Master purchased the rights to the series in 2018, with Perplexus's logo and first three courses being modernized in 2019.
Though the perplexus.net site currently redirects to Spin Master, which has limited locations for Perplexus products, you can still visit the Superplexus site
, and RC Insight has more detailed analyses and reviews of this line of products.
Released installments of Perplexus:
NOTE: The starting point is excluded from the number of checkpoints in courses with endpoints.
- Pre-Perplexus-brand era:
- Superplexus (2002, 100 obstacles, 2 checkpoints)
- a~! mini (2004, 10 obstacles)
- Classic era:
- Original (2009, 100 obstacles, 2 checkpoints, re-branded as Beast in 2019)
- Epic (2010, 125 obstacles, 3 checkpoints, re-branded in 2019)
- Rookie (2011, 70 obstacles, re-branded as Rebel in 2019, and Prophecy in 2020)
- Twist (2013, 30 obstacles, 8 checkpoints, though the course is around twice as complex in practice)
- Warp (2014, 80 obstacles, 2 checkpoints)
- World's Smallest: Original (2015, 100 obstacles, 2 checkpoints)
- Death Star (2015, 115 obstacles, 1 checkpoint, themed after Star Wars)
- Limited-production kinetic sculptures:
- Perplexus Giant (2016, 100 obstacles, 2 checkpoints)
- PlayMonster courses:
- Q-Bot (2016, 33 obstacles)
- Drakko (2016)
- Spin Master design era:
- World's Smallest: Twist (2018, 60 obstacles, 7 checkpoints)
- Mini Spiral (2018, loop with 4 entrances)
- Mini Cascading Cups (2018, loop with 4 entrances)
- World's Coolest: Teeter (2019)
- World's Coolest: Spiral (2019)
- World's Coolest: Cascading Cups (2019)
- LightSpeed (2019, timed obstacles, loop with 2 entrances)
- Go! Spiral (2019, 30 obstacles)
- Go! Stairs (2019, 30 obstacles)
- Twisted (2020, has nothing special to do with Perplexus Twist)
- Sidewinder (2020)
- Revolution Runner (2020, motorized sections)
- Rubik's Hybrid (2021, 100 obstacles, based on the 2x2 Rubik's cube, with all three axes rotatable)
- Rubik's Fusion (2021, 225 obstacles, based on the 3x3 Rubik's cube, albeit with only one axis to rotate on)
- Go! Snitch (2022, 30 obstacles, based on the Golden Snitch from Harry Potter)
- Portal (2022, 150 obstacles, 2 checkpoints)
The Perplexus series provides examples of:
- Checkpoint Starvation:
- Rookie/Rebel/Prophecy and both Rubik's courses are traditionally long courses that lack any starting points outside the very beginning.
- The difficult Death Star has only one checkpoint in the middle of the course.
- Downplayed with World's Coolest: Cascading Cups; which removes the three additional entrances from Mini Cascading Cups whilst retaining the approximate complexity.
- Difficulty Levels:
- LightSpeed allows you to choose from three game modes that determine how fast its time limits are.
- Revolution Runner has several settings for rotation speed, letting you either activate the rotation freely or work with a constant speed.
- Endless Game: The Mini Spiral and Cascading Cups have a closed course that can be looped through indefinitely.
- Fake Difficulty: The World's Smallest Original and Twist are tougher to navigate than the larger counterparts they faithfully copy. The smaller ball travels more roughly and is more vulnerable to friction, making players hope they don't shove the ball off an edge with a sudden movement. World's Smallest Twist also has lanes that line up more poorly, the small size forcing gaps to be wider relative to the ball.
- Gimmick Level: Several courses provide consistent spins on the maze, whilst leaving the genre and demanded skillset unaffected:
- Twist has half of its track rotatable on an axis, and the ball is forced to travel between the two sides by aligning specific lanes together.
- Warp forces you to handle the shell's unusual shape: a spherized octahedron.
- LightSpeed makes you speed through relatively simple obstacles to the correct colored chamber in limited amounts of time.
- Revolution Runner allows you to control the motorized rotation of several rings to get the ball closer to the center.
- Rubik's Hybrid and Fusion make you shift the tracks to allow the ball to proceed through the course.
- Portal has three buttons you can push to shift certain parts of the course.
- Hard Mode Filler: Inverted with the World's Coolest Spiral, which has way fewer obstacles than the Mini Spiral it takes after, and is thus easier.
- Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels: The three earliest Perplexus models are named for their different difficulty levels:
- Rookie
- Original
- Epic
- Interface Screw: Several parts of the tight cubic structures of Q-Bot, Rubik's Hybrid, and Rubik's Fusion make it hard to see where the ball is, increasing the obstacles' difficulty.
- Macro Zone:
- The Perplexus Giant was a sculpture that tripled its smaller counterpart's diameter, and like several unreleased courses in its likeness, could only be placed as a globe on a stand.
- Inverted with all World's Smallest and World's Coolest courses, whose ball and lanes are miniaturized relative to the toys' user and the rest of the series.
- The Perplexus Giant was a sculpture that tripled its smaller counterpart's diameter, and like several unreleased courses in its likeness
- Mad Marble Maze: All courses revolve around getting a marble through various obstacle courses.
- Marathon Level: While Rubik's Fusion doesn't throw many tough barriers at you, it is devoid of checkpoints — and the single longest Perplexus course there is, the obstacle number being 225.
- Orange/Blue Contrast: The lanes branching from the ends of Twist's axis are colored with orangeish and blue hues, respectively to differentiate them.
- Solo Tabletop Game: Despite being a physical tabletop series, Perplexus mazes only require one player.
- Themed Stock Board Game: Death Star is based on the superweapon of the same name from StarWars, whilst Prophecynote and Go! Snitch are themed after Harry Potter.
- Time Trial: The early Superplexus and a~! mini have timers activated and stopped by starting point obstacles and the finish point.
- Unexpected Gameplay Change: Twisted and Sidewinder are a far cry from the multi-plane courses that make Perplexus stand out — they are small, layered mazes that a ball is maneuvered either into or out of, with the risk of dead ends replacing that of falling off-course.
