December 11, 2022

When we moved in to this house the old owners left a bunch of garbage and old stuff lying around everywhere.

Most of it wasn't worth keeping or donating but one thing we decided to hang onto was a 90's version of the board game Mouse Trap.

I love that stupid game.

It's janky as hell, never quite works, and there are what feels like 3967475867 pieces which could get lost

and as it turns out there was a piece that got lost.

Maybe the most important one, in fact:

The diver who "jumps" into the bucket at the end of the game and triggers the mouse trap to "fall".

In what I'm sure was only an act of humouring me, John and I tried to find replacements for the Diver piece but nothing worked.

The piece needs to be light enough to "jump" up and shaped the right way to land in the basin.

It also needs to stand upright and not fall over as you play through the game.

It's a tall order for a small piece.

As it turns out buying the piece individually would cost more in shipping than just re-buying the game again, so a few weeks ago when it went on sale yr girl bought another version of Mouse Trap.

Now we have two Mouse Traps.

One from the 90's, and a new one that feels completely different.

You still play as a mouse

and there's still a trap

but you don't go through the game building a janky Rube Goldberg machine, in the new one because it's all pre-built before the game starts 

which I guess is what they meant when they wrote "Easier to Set Up Than Previous Versions" on the box

and had me feeling an awful lot like an old man yelling at a cloud as we played it

(because of course we played both versions back-to-back)

When we got to the end of the Mouse Trap version I played as a kid John and I were both in the "cheese wheel" loop at the end of the game where you go around and around in circles until you catch all yr friends

but that never happened because the machine never worked properly.

The marbles were the right weight

the table was even

but the "Helping Hand" piece kept getting knocked so it didn't push the second marble into the bathtub so it could fall and make the Diver jump into the tub.

Eventually we did what everyone does when they play Mouse Trap: we gave up. 

But before we packed everything away we did a side-by-side comparison of the two versions. 

The newer version of Mouse Trap feels like it's for wee children because, like I said, you don't build the machine as you go.

You go around the board collecting cheese and the person with the most cheese at the end of the game is the winner

which is not the "last man standing" cutthroat version of Mouse Trap I know and love

but I digress.

We checked the number of pieces 
(which are different)
we checked the number of tiles
(also different)
we checked the number of cheese pieces
(also, you guessed it, different)

but the biggest difference we found when we compared the two was the most shocking of all:

the new Mouse Trap Rube Goldberg machine actually works.

Every time. Without fail.

The sign hits the tub
which hits the marble
which hits the broom
which spins around 
knocks the marble into the tub
that hits the Diver
who jumps into the tub

every damn time.

So as much as I'm loathe to admit that a newer version of something I grew up with might be superior

I do have to admit

it's nice to have a version of Mouse Trap that actually works for once

even if it does feel like it's for wee babies.

---