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@bengood921, I’ve always wanted to build (or play!) a “manual” GBC, making it a game of dexterity and basic puzzling to play.
I used to build these as a kid and use a marble, before Zamor spheres were a thing. Here’s the rules:
There’s only one ball that the player maneuvers through the contraption. No fingers used, but LEGO bars instead, like chopsticks, keeping the ball in contact with the build at all times (except when shooting a basket by springs or something like that). Skate or roll the ball across tricky surfaces, ride it along studs or fences, open gates for it to go farther… kinda like the game Marble Madness. or the old board game Mousetrap. If the ball falls onto the baseplate, the game is over.
This is one of those things that’s truly interactive.
* Build little numbers near the stations, and color the modules by difficulty.
* See how many stations you can get the ball to travel to in a limited span of time as the clock ticks down.
* Maybe build the whole thing in a cube and have the ball climb upward over time
* You can rest the ball at some particular stations and pivot the build to keep going.Surfaces matter now as increased difficulty. Studless surfaces are a LOT harder than something with studs. Steps. Ramps. Miniature gimbal mazes. Different LEGO surfaces react with the ball differently. Some are slick, some coarse. Rubber tires as bumpers.
What do you think?
I used to build mazes with 3-5 graders in a LEGO class after school. Each kid had a single 32×32 baseplate. We used LEGO soccer balls, so the paths only had to be 2 studs wide. This was definitely a popular activity with the kids. The photo attached is the example I showed the kids, but their mazes were much more creative. 🙂
Hmm, well I am definitely interested in seeing where this discussion goes. And I definitely have questions and suggestions, but because of upcoming travel commitments, I may not be able to give this one a proper response til late next week. But I have read it and am giving it some thought.
I started with 1x brick walls and a 2 stud wide channels on the baseplate, as a marble (and LEGO spheres) can roll quickly in a fairly controlled line with two studs under it, and with walls, it can be safe to roll even faster. Tile makes the ball faster yet, but less controllable, which can be a good thing for higher difficulty.
Arches, both decorative and supportive, can be an unexpected obstacle to changing the ball’s direction. Having one control “stick” in each hand means you have to poke at the ball to get it into the right position for it to move on.
IDEA: blue-yellow-red-black categories for the difficulty of a section and ball paths, giving puzzle sections a theme and making destinations for the ball more clear.
IDEA: LBG or white can be used as indicators of moveable things that can interact with the ball, beyond the manual sticks the player holds.
IDEA: Turntable bottoms to rest the ball at a particular place. Untested.
IDEA: Trans-clear sections surrounded by empty space to make the path a little more scary.
Just ideas!
@bengood921: Are there module standards for a GBC? What are they? Would those standards fit this manual, interactive, game version I’m thinking of?
I’m finally getting around to replying to this one, I certainly hadn’t forgotten about it.
– First, just to be clear, as Greg alluded to in his post, soccer balls and Zamor spheres are not the same diameter. A soccer ball will drop through a 2×2 hole, and a Zamor sphere will not. I’m not sure if it matters which one you choose, but you want to pick one or the other for your standard so people can plan their modules accordingly. Neither type is easy to get on BL, although I’m guessing Zamor spheres are both more plentiful and less expensive these days. Being able to fit through a 2×2 gap is pretty convenient though.
(Incidentally, I did not figure out the diameter difference on my own, I had incorrectly assumed they were the same until I did GBC at BFVA14 and Tom Atkinson enlightened me on the subject. GBC uses soccer balls, as well as basketballs and volleyballs, which also work. I’m pretty sure that prior to that I must’ve done quite a bit of testing using Zamor spheres. For example, I remember being surprised when somebody built a (very cool and much more clever than anything I’d thought of) module using the LoM aerotubes, cause I had rejected it as a potential conduit because a ball didn’t fit. Of course, what must’ve happened is that I’d tested it with a Zamor.)
– Second, tell me more about the chopsticks used to manipulate the balls. You mentioned Lego bars but were not more specific. I’m assuming you mean something like lightsaber bars, but given their short length, using them to manipulate a ball through an obstacle course seems like it would lend itself to a lot of accidental bonking of stuff with your hands. Are we using some sort of Lego assembly to hold the bars? I believe a length-two axle connector will clutch a lightsaber bar, so you put that in one end, and a length 12 axle in the other, and now you’ve got something you can work with. I’m not sure what the ideal length would be, that might require some experimentation. You could also of course just use axles as the parts that come into contact with the balls, although the plus-shape cross-section of the axles may make them unsuitable, I’d be inclined to try lightsaber bars first.
The GBC standards are easy enough to find if you search for them online. The important parts:
– your GBC starts with a 10x10x10 container, and proceeds from there. At the end, you know the next module will also start with a 10x10x10 container, so your module must be designed to dump the balls into such a container. Between the beginning and the end, you can pretty much do whatever you want with your module. For Great Ball Journey, you would definitely want something similar, where you know the end of one module is gonna line up with the beginning of the next one.
GBC is designed to go infinitely in a loop. GBJ seems like it’s gonna work better with a definite start and end, but that’s easily accomplished here, you come up with a standard starting line module and a standard finish line module.
I’m thinking though that GBJ modules will work better if they mate up directly, using Technic holes and pins, similar to how Moonbase is done. So you’d wanna design an end view of how each module starts and ends, and then you can just pin them together when it’s time to play. Then again, you can do whatever you want in between.
– GBC standard is that you’re moving an average of one ball per second, or if you’re moving them in batches, your module can accept 30 balls at a time. These criteria have no analogy in GBJ and therefore aren’t relevant. (Also, one per second is an ideal that is never actually achieved.)
– A less commonly discussed part of the GBC standard (but one that one of my modules didn’t meet, which meant that Tom gave me a hard time about it) is that the start and end of your module should line up. In other words, if you draw an imaginary center line through the start of your module, and this line is parallel to the edge of the table, then that line should also bisect the end of your module. In GBC there is nonetheless some flexibility to how the modules can be arranged, but in GBJ this would be a big deal because all the modules need to be close enough to one side of the table so that the person playing, who may be a small child – can easily reach them. In fact, I think your standard may benefit from declaring a maximum distance that any ball path can be from the edge of the table. I don’t have any suggestions for an actual amount, that might have to come from experimentation/trial and error.
That’s really it for the GBC standard, like Moonbase, it was designed to be as open-ended as possible. I think a similar approach should work for GBJ.
I’m definitely interested in seeing some actual examples though, to get a better idea of what you really have in mind. Do you have some old photos, or something put together, or can you easily put something together to show us, just to get the ball rolling (no pun intended! 😀 😀 :D)?
I had initially pictured the modules as static, but then it occurred to me that it might be fun to have moving obstacles, courtesy of Power Functions. But I’m not sure that’s such a good idea. My inspiration was miniature golf, but when you hit a ball through a moving windmill, you can keep yourself and your club a safe distance away from said windmill. In GBJ, it seems like there’d be a high risk of accidental bonking or getting stuff jammed or some sort of huge disaster. Also, there’d be a risk that the game would in fact essentially become some sort of Lego version of miniature golf, which could be fun, but does not seem like it’s actually in the spirit of what Rich had in mind when he came up with it.
That’s all I can think of right now. It’s too late at night to proofread this one, so if there’s any really bad errors, you guys’ll just have to suffer. I can edit the post tomorrow.
* Well, yeah, GBJ may very well have LEGO miniature golf style in it. But also, it could be a full GBC module in style and presentation. It could also be a Greg style maze. ALL of these concept work and add variety.
* GBJ can also have elements of the video game Marble Madness in it, which is the original inspiration for me. This does include moving or movable objects, including manipulating the ball among “enemy” Zamor spheres, and intentionally bonking and flicking the ball via LEGO levers and manual machinery as part of the play.
* I like the idea of modules having static and directly lined up bins to start and finish, but, since only one ball is being run at a time, those Start/Finish bins can now be made very small.
* Since only one ball is being run at a time, and with a 2×2 pit being convenient for drops, the ball being run probably should be a standard GBC basketball or soccer ball. Those may be expensive, but we’d only need a handful for total play. The fact that Zamors are BLOCKED by the very same 2×2 pits means that this difference has puzzle potential.
* Two things that would need to be considered is the “chopsticks”, one held in each hand, to manipulate the ball. Yes, longer is better, maybe a length of 12-16. It would have to be a rule that it’s okay to “choke up” on the bars to ride the ball more carefully. Maybe pit some oar parts on the ends. It’s *supposed to be* tricky and slippery to move the ball around, and earlier modules should teach that it is.
* In my experiences fooling around with a GBJ, the texture and surfaces of LEGO elements become a lot more important. These balls are slippery because of the low contact surface to begin with, and every vertex, facet, stud, antistud, pin, it all comes into play, more like a pinball machine-maze-machine that a player has control of in slow and tricky control.
* I thoroughly agree that all of the GBJ needs to be primarily within kid height and reach, including depth INTO the modules, some of which might be multilevel, double back, intersect with themselves, and so on. And the end of every run celebrated with cheers.
The other fun thing about building a GBJ is that theme no longer matters, which makes building these things pure fun for me. It’s like an abstract amusement park.
I personally liked to match difficulty to color, so that blue was easy, yellow was tough, and red was downright hard. I built these in height, so that your ball had a chance to thump from a red section down to rest on a yellow or blue area to save it from the green “death” that ended the run.
With the five core colors that I have now, I’d want to do a white-blue-yellow-red-black sequence of difficulty, and maybe add little themes inside the walls. Use all the parts that make no sense.
Low walls and guardrails are necessary to reach the oars in to guide the ball, but aren’t necessary all the time. Sometimes reaching the ball can be tricky as things get in the way, and puzzling out how to get the ball going again out of a tight spot was fun for me in more difficult sections. Kids are not likely to agree, and the LUGgers running the GBJ event will definitely need to both fish balls out of tight spots as well as declare a run complete.
Maybe marking runs with a three color coded stack of 1×1 plates that face the players would be fun so that players can come back and point out where their run ended, or be among the winners who finished up to a particular module. Little groupings of winners. Because everyone is.
I agree with Rich on the idea of abstract and themeless. In the Hanlon & Hanlon videos in recent years, Stuart and especially Tom have repeatedly promoted the idea of themed GBC modules. I’m not a fan. To me, making the module look like a castle or an R2D2 or whatever does not make the module more interesting – if I want to build those things, I can do it separately – and such decorations in fact can be distracting from what’s important, which is the motion of the balls and the mechanisms that move them. I’ve seen some that actually make it more difficult to see the path of travel for the balls. On my first GBC in 2014, I did dress it up a bit, especially at the bottom, to look like some sort of futuristic robot-operated factory for moving soccer balls, but I didn’t bother repeating that in future builds.
On the other hand, I am a big fan of modules built to some sort of well-defined color scheme. I realize that some people have to build with what they have available (which was an issue for me in my first GBC also, which is why I subsequently BLed all those yellowish green panels and the dbg trap doors), but in GBC there’s a lot of engineering types who give literally zero consideration to what color parts they’re using when they build. Tom has a module that works well and is reliable and can take a lot of balls at once, my module emptied into it my first year, but I also remember asking Tom at one point if, when he designed the module, he deliberately chose the ugliest color scheme he could possibly think of. His response was “Why, what’s wrong with it?” But I’ve also seen some modules that look really sharp, including one that’s pink and black, and one that’s blue and orange. Once I discovered that the yellowish green panels look really good with the two grays (and also draw a lot of comments from the public), I started to restrict the addition of other colors, although eventually I’m gonna have to make some exceptions for certain specialized parts.
I mention all this, of course, because it all transfers over to Great Ball Journey. I also like Rich’s white-blue-yellow-red-black color scheme for increasing difficulty, although I would hesitate to make it the standard for the color scheme for the full module. I’d be concerned that this would be too limiting for too many builders, both because they might not have the parts they need in those colors, or even that Lego might not make the parts they want in those colors – although you could certainly still do it that way if you wanted to. As an alternative, I’m going to suggest that at the beginning of each module, builders place a signpost indicating the difficulty, still using the same color scheme. My initial idea here is that the difficulty is indicated by either a 2×2 brick (easy to get in those colors), or two 2×2 bricks stacked (easier to see). Put an LBG tile on top, an LGB plate on the bottom, and then whatever you want as the signpost below (there’s plenty of options but a stack of 1×1 round bricks is the most obvious choice), and finally find a spot for it at the beginning of the module.
After I thought about it, it occurred to me that an added bonus of the signposts is that it’s then easy to change them if the difficulty changes, either cause the module is modified, or because the difficulty has been reevaluated, possibly in light of the modules placed before and after it in the line-up, since difficulty in this situation is gonna be relative. That’s actually the challenge of any difficulty rating, is accurately assessing the true level (as an example, I have been doing puzzles in the Cracking the Cryptic apps – the puzzles are in order from easiest to hardest, but you’d never know that if you only looked at the times it takes me to do them, which can range for from fairly short to remarkably long, in no discernable pattern). But I still think it would be worth trying.
Right after I did that last post, I was still thinking about it, and I came up with one more idea, so I’m gonna post about it here, even though it’s admittedly unlikely to be created in real life:
I was thinking about how it would go if we have a GBJ display out for the public to play on (rather than just for our own amusement). It’s already been alluded to that you’d only have one person running the course at a time, which is a pretty obvious conclusion regardless, since otherwise there’s gonna be huge problems with people getting in each other’s way or bonking into each other. So the first question would be, do we plan to time their runs with a stopwatch? The alternative would just letting them do it, and that’s it, they would essentially have to come up with their own way of measuring how they did. We could also create a leaderboard with the top three times, although I don’t know if we want to be that competitive about it.
But the main idea I had is based on the fact that in any kind of race, head to head racing is always more exciting than individual timed runs. So I’m imagining identical obstacle courses set up on opposite sides of banquet tables, and two competitors race from start to finish. The main drawback to this is obvious – it requires exactly double the amount of Legos to accomplish (it also means that if you made up your module as you built it, you need to be able to figure out how to replicate it afterwards). It also requires a table setup where both sides of the table are accessible to the public, which could be tough to pull off in venues where we have less space. But I thought it was a fun and interesting enough idea to be worth mentioning here.
IDEA: DIFFICULTY SIGNPOSTS
White-blue-yellow-red-black is all LEGO core colors. Some of the fun in designing and building a GBJ, even a simple one brick tall maze, is thinking about the parts as obstacles and challenges for the ball to move over, and everybody has some of these bricks for sure. It’s just my instinct to try to color block sections of a GBJ and use the goofy bricks I don’t normally use to build abstract stuff and at best little dioramas in there.
Difficulty can change through the module, sure, and yes, there should be a difficulty signpost there, both for a feeling of milestone achievement, and as an indication that the player can rest a ball nearby.
I’m with you, Ben. The theme or color blocking of a module should be freeform for the fun of building and variety, except for…
IDEA: RUBE GOLDBERG
In the case of a GBJ, we can definitely have the appearance of a Rube Goldberg machine where the player can manipulate the ball’s path without touching the ball much during that module. We could color code parts that are specifically designed to be manipulated by the player to control or restrict the ball’s path. Perhaps as the same color as the control sticks, which suggests a bley.IDEA: BUILDING COMPACT
Since there are only the two axle sized sticks poking into a GBJ, a module here can be built much more tightly than a GBC, only because much of the motorization, gearing, and housing can be eliminated in this largely manual play environment. There’s only one ball to worry about and the access to it, which may intentionally be restricted by the build for more difficulty. I do agree that the ball needs to remain visible and accessible at all times, especially around manually manipulated obstacles.
IDEA: SURFACES
Some things I’ve had fun with in a GBJ:
* Tile surfaces, which are more slippery, adding a jumper plate here and there to avoid.
* Slope bricks, which have a more coarse texture than a smooth surface. It is noticable during play.
* Fences. Two fences next to each other form a pair of parallel bars for the ball to roll along.
* Transparent parts. These are scarier when moving the ball across them, because they feel more fragile, even though we know that these parts have greater clutch.This all sounds really complicated, but no. It can be as simple as a one brick tall maze around a 32 x 32 with no elevation changes or any danger of losing at all.
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