In this game you con­trol our mischievous hero, Puck!, who, in punishment for his annoying japes, has been trapped in an en­chant­ed gar­den maze on the day be­fore mid­sum­mer, and who must col­lect all the fairy dust scattered around the maze by his cap­tors, the fairies Cobweb, Mus­tardseed, Peaseblos­som, and Moth, in order to use its mag­i­cal pro­per­ties to es­cape the maze and indulge in more pranksterism on Mid­sum­mer Night at the expense of his friends!

Puck! is under an en­chant­ment which causes him to re­live the day if caught by a fairy be­fore he has col­lect­ed all the fairy dust! How­ev­er there are mag­i­cal mush­rooms scat­tered to the far corners of the maze, which will pro­tect Puck! from the fai­ries' touch for a few seconds when he eats one. But fairy dust, being mag­i­cal, is only visi­ble for a short time and keeps disap­pear­ing, so Puck! must remember where in the maze there is still some fairy dust remain­ing to be col­lect­ed!

Gentle video-game players: this is not Pac­man or Ms Pac­man despite a su­per­fi­cial resem­blance – the only thing that’s the same is the lay­out of the mazes. Puck! is as much a game of memory as it is of fast re­flexes…

Here are some hints that may help you play the game:
• Everything is reset when you are caught: all the fairy dust is restored. You can try each level repeatedly but you have to clear the maze in a single run
• Eat the magical mushrooms to get a boost of speed and escape to an area of the maze free from fairies
• You can run past the fairies while under the influence of the magical mushrooms, but it wears off very quickly
• Save as many mushrooms as you can for later when you might need them more
• Remember that you can reverse direction
• Fairies cannot reverse direction so following behind a fairy might be a way to escape a difficult situation
• Sometimes the best move is to just sit still and let the fairies pass you by
• Fairies do not always head straight towards you so if one is on your tail, try to pass as many junctions as you can because each fork in the path is another chance for your pursuer to head in another direction

Car­tridges with this game were given to some members of the Face­book group "Vec­trex Fans Unite!" as their Secret Santa Christmas gift from the au­thor – a down­load­able bin file has been made avail­able (free) for every­one else to enjoy since New Year's Day 2025.

The game was writ­ten as a col­la­bora­tion between Gra­ham Toal, and Chris ‘Mal­ban’ Salo­mon who wrote the fast graph­ics code which al­lowed us to create a flicker-free game boast­ing lots of graph­ics, which was thought not to be pos­si­ble when the Vec­trex was released in the 80's with its own pac-style game, “Clean Sweep”. To achieve the best qual­i­ty display, Puck! re­quires an in­i­tial cali­bra­tion step, which only has to be done once as it is stored in a small memory chip on the car­tridge. (I'll add a video of how to do the cali­bra­tion short­ly.)

The best way to play this game is by using one of the aforementioned car­tridges or a com­pa­ti­ble flash cart: the binary file for which can be down­load­ed here. The same binary works fine on eprom carts that don't have the memory chip, so that is the recommended download for most people. However, a couple of flash car­tridges that im­ple­ment banked memory will not work with this ver­sion of the ROM, so for those there is an al­ter­na­tive binary file avail­able which does not save the cali­bra­tion info. Our source code is also on­line for pro­gram­mers to modi­fy and ex­pand on.

The Puck! ex­peri­ence can be enhanced with a bezel over­lay or a wrap, from Ralf at Vec­trex Over­lays! (Con­tact Ralf by email at vec­trex.over­lays@gmail.com)

    

My preference for an overlay to use with Puck! is a simple flat green sheet – I worry that anything more complex is not going to align well with the corridors in the graphics, not to mention that there are four separate levels with different layouts that might merit separate overlays; but if that is your preference, Steven Kray does offer an overlay in his usual colourful style:

However, Ralf, from Vectrex Overlays, has come up with a solution that I think works great, and in a style that complements his wrap and bezel designs above:

As well as offering this design as a traditional overlay, Ralf has generously created a version of this as a printable border frame that you can cut out by hand (instructions here), to attach to a generic green overlay which you can create at home from a theater gel. I think printing the border frame on self-adhesive silvered paper looks especially nice! Ooh, shiny!

(If you're ordering these from Ralf, I recommend chosing either the overlay plus the wrap, or the bezel.)

Save and print the image below (at 300 dpi) to make a label for the car­tridge:

Alex Fitch creat­ed a printable box which you can print your­self (if you have a wide­-body printer), or have print­ed at a local copy shop, to as­sem­ble at home:

Now, I hear you saying ‘That's all well and good for you lucky souls with A3 printers, but what about us mere mortals with A4 or US Letter printers?’ — well, you're in luck! As of today (Jan 15th) we now have a version of the DIY box which you can make at home using a regular normal-sized printer … as long as it supports 'print to edge' mode, i.e. no enforced white margin. This version prints on two US Letter sheets that you simply stick together. Go read the details of how to make one of these boxes at this new (and currently still rather bare) web page.

The software au­thors (Gra­ham Toal and Chris Salo­mon) give per­mis­sion to hob­by­ists to make car­tridges for per­son­al use con­tain­ing this game. The game may also be in­clud­ed on com­bi­na­tion mul­ti­carts. All the printables are copyright by their respective authors and also for personal use only. For any other use of any of these, please check with the respective creators first.

The Secret Santa ver­sion of Puck! was writ­ten over a period of eight weeks and was fin­ished just in time to be sent to the Secret Santa re­ci­pients! That was Version 0.50 which turned out to have a minor bug – you could only play the first two levels. Version 0.51 fixed that bug and allowed you to play all four levels to completion; and the current version (0.53, linked to above) is a maintenance release that slightly improves the graphics in some cases and ensures the display doesn't flicker. (Long time Vectrex users will understand what we mean when we explain that the upgrade keeps the frame rate below 30,000 cycles at all times. Before this upgrade the display was mostly flicker free but there was a rare circumstance as you approached the end of some levels where the screen updates slowed down a little).

How­ev­er that is not the end of develop­ment and new features will be added in enhanced ver­sions to be released throughout 2025. Watch this page or sub­scribe to the Vec­trex Fans Unite! group on Face­book for no­tif­i­ca­tion of upgraded releases.