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Tilt collection

This page now hosts all the clickmazes puzzles that feature the 'tilt' rule. If you've not tried them before this is a great place to start your clickmazes tour.

June 2009: Big News! The ever popular 2D tilt-mazes are now available for iPhone & iPod touch as puzzle-app iTilt developed by cancerian-9. iTilt includes a range of new features and many new challenges suitable for all age-groups and skill-levels.

	2D tilt mazes Roll the ball around the tray and collect all the blue goals. updated: June 2009		3D tilt mazes Three layers of tilt maze interlinked with lift and drop points.
	Tilt puzzles Two sliding blocks in one tilt tray. Each block must reach its own goal.		Marble mazes Losing your marbles has never been so much fun.
	Cups & peas Learn to juggle, tilt style, with cups and peas.		Magnetic blocks Tilt blocks with magnetic attraction. Unite and conquer.
	HexaRoll Tilt with a twist. A tilt inspired puzzle from Oskar.

Observations on tilt-mazes...
Tilt is actually one manifestation of the simplest of multi-state maze-rules. The must-go-straight rule or, more simply, the bridge. Most people probably would not consider a maze with bridges truly multi-state (I didn't for a long time, note how I separate under-and-over mazes from direction-control mazes in my maze-gallery). However, from a two-dimensional viewpoint, when you stand on a bridge you are clearly in one of two states, either on the upper-path or the lower-path, and clearly climbing from one state to another is not permitted.

In the tilt-maze, as in many multi-state mazes, the bridge is implicit. Any (square) cell that is lacking all four wall creates a bridge (a hexagonal cell creates potential for a triple-bridge). Far more subtle in a tilt-maze however are the half-bridges, created by a cell with a wall on only one side. The effect of the half-bridge is rather like a half-built fly-over where, unless you simply reverse, you end up dropping from the upper-road to the lower-road and (most importantly) you are not permitted to reverse this decision. Every junction in a tilt maze is effectively one of these half-built fly-overs, which means every significant decision you make is non-reversible. You can easily end up right back at the beginning or, worse still, completely stuck.

Thus the tilt-maze combines two of the simplest yet most powerful maze-constructs, the bridge and the one-way-arrow, but does so with almost complete transparency, making the trickery very hard to spot.

Related pages....
Magnetic block applet home-page (more puzzles!)
Cup and pea applet home-page (more puzzles!)
Hexaroll applet home-page
Tilt mazes as spin puzzles

Tilt maze articles...
Mensa Bulletin (USA), November 1999. Amazing Mazes by Robert Abbott.
Discover Magazine (USA), September 2003. Bogglers by Scott Kim