How to build a Duplo Marble Maze

Having moved to Germany, leaving all my daughter's toys behind, we were very lucky to inherit a lot of toys from my husband's childhood. Being the tinkering, building type he is means that a lot of the toys he owned are building blocks, Lego and the larger version Duplo. Most of the time my daughter uses the Duplo to build towers. She doesn't mind when they fall over, which they do and often, she just rebuilds and asks me to join her. As you can see in the photo she has sometimes managed to build towers about a foot taller than herself!

 Me personally, I am sick of building Duplo towers! It's OK for say 20 minutes a day but after that 20 minute mark I am looking to escape.  I mean there has to be more to Duplo than just building towers right?  That's when I remembered watching this clip on YouTube where someone had built a Lego maze for their hamster to run through. Now we might not have a hamster but we do have marbles! And so our Duplo marble maze was born.  

Here are the instructions for how to build one yourself. 

What you will need

• Large Duplo board
• Duplo bricks of various sizes
• one marble
• Eager adult and child ready to build! 

First start by building a single layer of bricks around the perimeter of your board. Once you've done that decide where your marble maze is going to start and where it will finish. Once you have decided, start putting bricks around leaving 2 nob spaces free for your path. If you have enough Duplo pieces it is better to build all the walls 2 bricks up so that the marble doesn't fall out of the maze when it's moved around. We unfortunately don't have that much so the marble gets lost every now and then.

You can make it easy for young children by setting up a single path towards the finish. This is the easiest version we were able to come up with. Start is at top right hand corner and finish is the bottom left hand corner.

 To make it harder you can create nooks like in a real maze that trick you or block the marble from reaching its goal. These are just small nooks and don't take much moving of the board to get out of. The path itself is also pretty easy because it starts with needing to slant to the left, then across towards the top of the photo and then to the right, back towards the end again. See photo below.

This is what I like to think is the hardest maze I've made yet! See photo below.

 Well I thought it was a really hard maze but it only took 2 struggling turns before the little one mastered it. Unfortunately I didn't get  those first two attempt on video but here's a few photos of her playing with one of the mazes I made.

As you can see to play you just put the marble in the start position and move the board around to get the marble to move through the maze. Darling daughter likes to roll the marble back to the start position after she's got it through the maze. Back and forth, back and forth...

What I as a parent love about this game is that it is easy to increase the complexity of the game. Also it's easy to create a new maze, a few blocks moved and bingo! I also think it's a game that can entertain children of varying ages. I can imagine young toddlers or babies getting a big kick out of watching the marble move around, even if an adult has to do it for them and of course you could build this with Lego too, challenging older children by designing more complex mazes.It also gets you thinking creatively and challenging yourself to make harder mazes sure beats building those one brick towers!

If you give this idea a go please let me know how you went and send a photo of your hardest maze design. I'd love to share them and set up a bit of a slide show on this blog.

Thanks for reading and as always happy playing!