Revomaze: The Maze You Cannot See

Quick answer: a Revomaze is a metal cylinder with a maze cut into a shaft you can never see, navigated blind by feel. Invented by Chris Pitt. The easiest takes most people around five hours; the hardest of the original five ran past a hundred. Start with Aqua or Blue, and specifically not with Turquoise.

Best for: methodical solvers who will take notes, and nobody else.

Most hard puzzles are hard because the answer is difficult to see. A Revomaze is hard because you are never allowed to look at the problem at all.

These are also the puzzles that pulled Greg into this hobby. He found them at thirteen, as a speedcuber, after reading a review of a different puzzle that said simply: don't buy that, get a Revomaze instead.

What Is a Revomaze?

A sleeve over a shaft. Cut into the shaft is a maze, and a pin fixed in the sleeve runs through it. Move the sleeve and the pin travels the maze. Get the pin from one end to the other and the puzzle comes apart.

You never see the track. The sleeve covers it completely and no amount of examining the outside tells you anything.

That makes it the purest hidden maze, the sub-type described in maze puzzles explained, and the reason that category feels unlike anything else in the seven types of mechanical puzzle.

How Does the Mechanism Work?

Three moving ideas, and together they produce the difficulty.

The maze is a groove. The pin sits in it and can travel only where the groove allows. Every blocked direction is therefore a fact about the shape of the route, and facts are all you get.

The pin is the instrument panel. It is the only feedback the puzzle provides: it drops when you fall into a trap and lifts once the maze is complete. One bit of information, intermittently.

Traps return you to the start. This is the defining cruelty. Fall into one and you are not set back a few moves, you are back at the beginning, holding a map in your head that may or may not still be accurate.

What Are the Revomaze Grades?

The original series was five puzzles: Blue, Green, Bronze, Silver and Gold, with difficulty rated on a numbered scale.

The times are the part worth knowing. The easiest of that original set, Blue, was reckoned to take about five hours on average. The hardest of the five, which Greg rates as Silver, took people over a hundred hours. If a normal good puzzle is an evening, that is a different category of object entirely.

The range widened later. Aqua, Turquoise, Orange and Lime sit at the beginner end, and more have followed. Beginner here is relative: these are still extremely hard puzzles by any ordinary standard.

What Can You Buy Today?

The operation now trades as The Puzzle Workshop, and the puzzles are made in small batches in a family workshop in Askam-in-Furness, Cumbria. That is a meaningful change from the original run: these are handmade now rather than produced at scale.

The current line is REVOMAZE Lite, sold individually and in sets that step through a structured range of difficulty levels. They are precision-crafted aluminium with a brass core, which is there for balance and smooth motion as much as for feel, and on a puzzle navigated entirely by touch that matters more than it would elsewhere.

The older puzzles are grouped as Classics. Those are the ones most written about, including every grade covered above, and they are the ones you will find discussed on forums and in older reviews. Availability varies, because small-batch production means what exists depends on what has recently been made.

Special and limited editions appear periodically, usually in small numbered runs, which is the normal pattern for puzzles made this way and the reason the secondhand market for them is active.

Which Revomaze Should You Start With?

Aqua or Blue. Not Turquoise, and the reason is specific rather than snobbery.

Turquoise is officially reckoned the second easiest, and Greg disagrees flatly. It behaves differently from the other beginner Revomazes, and his verdict on starting there is memorable: you will end up throwing it in a pool. His advice is to meet Aqua or Blue first and come to Turquoise afterwards.

Green is the first intermediate Revomaze and assumes you have already solved one of the beginners. Attempting it cold is not ambitious, it is a waste of a good puzzle.

There are fuller reviews of each on our sister site: Blue, Turquoise, Green, and an introduction to the series with Aqua.

Why Does the Order Matter So Much?

Because the series is a progression, which is unusual and is the single most important thing to understand before buying.

Solving one Revomaze teaches you how the internal mechanics behave. That knowledge is not optional flavour, it is required equipment: some of these genuinely cannot be solved without having solved an easier one first. You are not just getting better at mazes, you are learning a specific vocabulary of what this designer does.

Almost nothing else in mechanical puzzling works this way. A burr is a burr; solving one does not unlock another. Here the skills compound deliberately, which is why the recommended order is a real recommendation rather than a sales ladder.

What Is Green Actually Like?

The clearest description Greg has given of the inside of one, and it explains the appeal better than any difficulty number.

Green has the feel of a retro video game: a hard stage you replay again and again. The sections acquire names as you learn them. You begin in what feels like a confusing forest. Having crossed it you arrive at a bridge, and the bridge is dangerous. Getting there is an achievement, and getting there does not mean you will get past it.

That is what mapping an invisible maze actually feels like from inside. Not a sequence of moves, but a landscape you gradually learn the shape of, with places in it you come to dread.

How Do You Solve a Revomaze?

By surveying rather than exploring, and by writing things down.

Map it on paper. Not optional at the higher grades. You are drawing something you cannot see from the pattern of where movement is blocked.

Move slowly and feel the walls. Speed produces motion and no information. Every stop is data.

Keep a fixed reference. Decide which way is up and never casually rotate the whole object. Losing orientation invalidates the map instantly.

Record the traps. You will hit them. Known trap locations are the most valuable marks on your map, because they are the cheapest information you will ever buy twice.

Stop deliberately. Concentration fails before the puzzle does. Ending a session with notes beats continuing badly and poisoning the map with guesses.

How Does It Compare to Other Hard Puzzles?

It is difficult in a way nothing else in this field is.

A hard burr like Extreme Torture takes 28 moves to free the first board, from a design search where only 0.18 per cent of over a million assemblies come apart at all. That is a brutal puzzle, and every piece of it is visible. The information is all in front of you.

A Revomaze gives you none. The task is not reasoning about a visible object, it is building a model of an invisible one, closer to surveying a cave than to solving a puzzle.

Which is why solvers excellent at interlocking puzzles are sometimes hopeless at these, and why the skill transfers poorly in either direction. Difficulty is not one quality.

Is a Revomaze Worth Buying?

For a narrower set of people than the reputation suggests, and the honest version is worth hearing before you spend.

If you enjoy methodical work, notes, and the slow accumulation of a model, there is nothing else like it anywhere in the hobby. If your pleasure comes from the flash of insight, a Revomaze offers almost none. There is no moment where you see it. There is the point at which your map is finally complete enough, which is a different and quieter satisfaction.

Build quality is not in question: these are precisely machined and the beginner grades are as well made as the expensive ones.

What Do We Make Instead?

We make no maze puzzles at all, and this is the deep end of a category we have nothing in. Saying so is more useful than pretending otherwise.

The nearest thing on our shelf to routing something through obstructions is Alpacka 1, a packing puzzle whose pieces must be manoeuvred past upright posts using a single free cell, where our own description notes that most of the dead ends are inside your head rather than in the puzzle. The hardest thing we make is Extreme Torture at 70 moves.

We work in interlocking and packing puzzles, where the difficulty is in seeing rather than surveying, and the range is in mechanical puzzles.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a Revomaze?

A metal puzzle of a sleeve over a shaft with a maze cut into it, invented by Chris Pitt. A pin runs the hidden maze and you navigate blind by feel, aiming to reach the far end and separate the pieces.

Which Revomaze should I buy first?

Aqua or Blue. Turquoise is often listed as the second easiest and behaves differently from the other beginners; Greg's advice is not to start there. Green is the first intermediate and assumes you have already solved a beginner.

How long does a Revomaze take to solve?

Blue, the easiest of the original five, averages around five hours. The hardest of that original set ran past a hundred hours for most solvers. Traps reset you to the start, so total time invested is usually far more than the final solve path suggests.

What are the Revomaze difficulty grades?

The original series was Blue, Green, Bronze, Silver and Gold, rated on a numbered difficulty scale. Aqua, Turquoise, Orange and Lime later filled in the beginner end, though beginner is relative: all of them are hard puzzles.

Do you have to solve Revomazes in order?

Effectively yes. The series is a deliberate progression: solving one teaches you how the internal mechanics behave, and some cannot realistically be solved without having solved an easier one first. This is unusual, since most puzzles do not build on each other.

What happens if you hit a trap in a Revomaze?

You go back to the beginning. The pin drops to tell you it has happened, and that is the only notice you get. It is the defining feature of the design and the reason mapping on paper matters so much.