Build a better Mousetrap?

Having torn my boys away from a very nearly obsessive Uno league. We scrabbled through the cupboard and came across a fairly underused version of Mousetrap.  I say version as it seems to differ quite a bit from the one I had as a kid, and not just through the inclusion of mice wearing trying-to-hard-to-be-hip skate gear.  For starters, and on the upside, it doesn’t need some sort of diploma in advance plastic moulding to get it to work, just a few folded bits of card and some numbered pieces to match up and it’s good to go.

But that’s where my praise peters out.  Perhaps I’m finally coming to terms with my inner-grump (similar to my inner-child but less likely to make me run away giggling) but I feel the siren call of “it was better when I were a lad” welling up within.  The game used to be about building an insanely complicated Rube Goldberg machine alongside some good natured sibling squabbling about leavers and trip wires.  And then, once you get to the circular track at the end playing a bizarre kind of russian roulette with the precariously balanced cage.  You then won or lost on the spin of the spinner, and went off to create machines with loo rolls, hot wheel tracks and marbles.

Now it’s a lot more, well, nice.  The machine is set up before the game, not during.  You now pick up 2 triv-esque cheeses on the way round from the trap squares, which are triggered in a self-sacrificial way.  On the one in three chance it traps/boots/springs you, you lose one cheese.  There is no sudden death, no nerve jangling anticipation as the ball rolls, it has been tamed.  And is, I think, worse for it.

The sibling squabble still seems to be apparent, though it was more about  how to roll a dice fairly than the mechanics of a back flipping diver… hey what happened to the diver.  Grump.

tag... review, play for today, 5up, 8up, board games