We were sent a copy of the new Mouse Trap game from Hasbro Gaming to check out and review. Our opinions are 100% our own.

Fresh from Hasbro Gaming is a completely updated Mouse Trap board game. When I was a kid there were a few friends who had this game. We did not and that is probably why I wanted to play it whenever I was with friends. The same went for Hungry Hungry Hippos. So it is a funny coincidence that in the new Mouse Trap game a hungry hippo is a key piece of the whole Rube Goldbergian machine. Don’t know who Rube Goldberg is, well he designed elaborate machines to perform simple tasks. Think: the contraptions at Doc Brown’s lab in Back to the Future, the one what opened the dog food for Einstein. That is what the game of Mouse Trap is like.

The game has been updated with a very simple setup but still holds onto some of the major elements of the original game. There are things like the bathtub, the boot and of course the trap itself. What is new is the monkey, hungry hippo, elephant and a large giraffe. This Mouse Trap is set in the jungle. The mice have been updated and enlarged for smaller hands to easily move around the board.

For the most part the game works great. I don’t think that the giraffe is weighted properly or that there is enough of a drop for the first ball to give the giraffe enough “oomph” to knock the second ball into the tub. We had to keep doing that part by hand. Otherwise all the points of the machine to trap the mice worked perfectly. I know because I had to set it up repeatedly. False starts and “bumps” from the kids kept triggering the trap.

Setup is way easier than it has ever been. All the pieces snap together including the game board. This makes for a sturdy board to play on and parts of the game that will work over and over.

Ages are for 4 and up to play the game. So, it wasn’t a great idea to have Andrew play with us because he kept causing a bit of a ruckus. Allison took him to the other room while Eva and I continued to play. Eva liked the game and then started to make up her own rules. Not sure why because the rules of the game were incredibly simple to follow. Keep going around the board till you catch a mouse. Can’t get much simpler than that.