Board game, Mousetrap, Ideal Toys, USA, 1960s-1970s

Three-dimensional board game with original packaging.

The board is card laminated with printed paper showing the route the players must take and various spaces to move players forwards, hinder them, or tell them to add a part of the mousetrap.

The game consists of several coloured plastic elements, assembled to produce a machine inspired by the art of Rube Goldberg. The parts work together to release cage at the end of the board - turning a crank handle causes gears to turn, springing a red Stop Sign mounted on a shaft to hit a boot hung from a Lamp-post. The blue boot kicks a yellow Bucket at the top of a staircase, releasing a steel ball to roll down the Stairway and along the Rain Gutter. At the bottom, it hits the bottom of the Helping Hand, jerking it upwards against the Thing-a-ma-jig (a platform), causing the Bowling Ball to fall through the Bathtub and onto one end of the Diving Board. This is a seesaw, at the other end is a Diver who is launched forwards into the Washtub. The force from this agitates the Cage Post, causing the Cage to descend. The parts are all mounted on three base plates which fit into holes in the game board with plastic tabs.

The playing pieces are three plastic mice coloured green, blue, red and yellow.

The lid of the card box is printed on the front with an illustration of the assembled game and the title, the sides have further illustrations of elements of the game and of mice. There is a set of folded paper instructions, printed in black ink, and a green wooden six-sided die.

Purchased.

Mouse Trap was one of the first mass produced, three-dimensional board games and the action focused gameplay made it an instant success – once a publisher was secured. Rejected by games publishers Milton Bradley and Parker Brothers it was snapped up by rival games company Ideal in 1963 and reportedly accumulated around 1.2 million sales in the first year. Mouse Trap’s gameplay was inspired by the complex devices of cartoonist, inventor and sculptor Rube Goldberg. Goldberg devised and drew absurd, complicated machines that made simple tasks ridiculously, and hilariously, difficult. It’s widely reported that Rube Goldberg didn’t receive any royalties or licensing fees despite Marvin Glass and Associates acknowledging Goldberg’s drawings as a source of inspiration.

Marvin Glass and Associates was founded in 1941 by Marvin Glass (1914–1974), an entrepreneur who was the creative drive behind the company. Along with Mouse Trap, Glass and his employees designed some of the other best-selling toys of the 1960s and 70s including Mr Machine, Operation and Simon. When Marvin Glass and Associates ceased trading in 1988 several partners went on to start up the Chicago based toy design company Big Monster Toys.

The gameplay of Mouse Trap involves players taking it in turns to roll the die and move their mouse-shaped game piece the appropriate number of squares. As players race around the board, they land on squares instructing them to build the three-dimensional mouse trap, following instructions illustrated in the centre of the game board. Once the mouse trap has been built, the aim of the game is to trap your opponents’ mice, which eliminates them from the game. Last mouse surviving, wins.

This version was published in 1970 during the height of the game’s popularity and is the original ‘roll and move’ luck-based design. Over the years Mouse Trap has undergone various modifications, the first in 1975 when games designer Sid Sackson re-designed the board, adding cheese game pieces along with an element of strategy to trapping opponents’ mice. The UK version, published in 2006, has different game elements including a model toilet perched at the top of the tallest part of the game, replacing the original bathtub.

What remains an intrinsic element to the gameplay is that sometimes the mechanism just doesn’t work and turning the crank creates only frustration and groans from the players at the malfunctioning machinery. Despite this, or for some players perhaps because of it, the game has enduring appeal and at the time of writing it’s still being published - currently by Hasbro. In 2004, forty-one years after it first went on sale, it was one of the UK’s 50 top- selling toys. The sense of wonder and joy at building an overly complicated contraption and watching the cause and effect of the machinery performing a simple task (or sometimes not!) is central to the game’s popularity.

Versions of the game have entered popular culture over the years. A giant version featured in ITV’s Saturday morning children’s TV show Motormouth from September 1990 to April 1992 where children took the place of mice. This isn’t the only giant version to be built for entertainment – at the time of writing a huge version, created in 2005 by San Francisco based Mouse Trap fan Mark Perez, is still touring the USA as an educational show demonstrating the physics behind the designs of the simple machines.

Mousetrap is widely reported as being the invention of Gordon Barlow, Burt Meyer and Marvin Glass - all designers at the toy design company Marvin Glass & Associates, based in Chicago. Harvey ’Hank’ Kramer, a designer at Ideal Toy Company in the early 1960s, is also in some instances credited with the design. It’s most likely that all the aforementioned had a hand in the design and that the Marvin Glass & Associates concept underwent some modification by Kramer before being published by Ideal.

Marvin Glass and Associates were granted a US Patent in 1967 for the invention of the game.

The concept of Mousetrap was inspired by cartoonist Rube Goldberg, whose imaginative contraptions were designed to perform simple tasks in an indirect and overly-complicated manner.

The gameplay of Mousetrap involves players taking it in turns to roll the die and move their mouse-shaped game piece the appropriate number of squares. As players race around the board, they land on squares instructing them to build the three-dimensional mouse trap, following instructions illustrated in the centre of the game board. Once the mouse trap has been built, the aim of the game is to trap your opponents’ mice, which eliminates them from the game. Last mouse surviving, wins.

Mousetrap has enjoyed enduring appeal since it was first published by Ideal in 1963, and has since been updated several times.

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