Mouse Trap (board game)

Game designer Marvin Glass (and his company, Marvin Glass and Associates) acknowledged that Mouse Trap had obviously been greatly influenced by Rube Goldberg's illustrations, though they refused to pay licensing or royalty fees. Glass later developed two lesser-known games based on Goldberg designs, Crazy Clock Game (Crazy Clock) (1964) and Fish Bait Game (Fish Bait) (1965), neither of which credit Goldberg's influence. Elderly and near retirement, Goldberg declined to take legal action against Glass, primarily because inspiration and ideas are not intellectual property that can be protected with a copyright, trademark, or patent. He instead chose to sell licensing rights for his drawings to another toy company, Model Products, to help secure the rights to specific intellectual property that he could own and receive royalties from.[11][12][13]

In Crazy Clock Game, players race to build a Rube Goldberg machine. The game comes with a pack of cards, each illustrating how one piece of the machine fits in. The deck is dealt out to the players. The player starts with the first card, card 1; players then play as many cards (install as many machine components) as they can, then pass to the next player. After fully assembling, they take turns trying to operate the machine, starting with the player who installed the last component; the winner is the one who first succeeds.[14]

Fish Bait Game is simpler than Mouse Trap. Players play as fishermen and build a contraption to catch a man-eating fish. Each time a player lands on an empty white space, the player must build a part of the contraption. Other spaces can either give the player an extra turn, take a turn, or go back a space. The game keeps going until the contraption is fully built and a player lands on the "FISH BAIT" space, when the player must take their piece on the plastic dock and hook the rubber band inside of the fish's mouth around the legs. Players keep moving until someone lands on the "CATCH FISH" space and starts the contraption to catch the other player's piece. Once caught, the player is out of the game (although if the trap fails, the one getting caught and the one catching the fish have to switch places until there is a successful catch) and the game continues; the winner is the last one standing.[15]

In the 1990s, Mouse Trap was adapted into a game show within the British children's television show Motormouth.[16] Child contestants take the place of the mice in a life-size board game.

Mouse Trap has been lampooned by Mark Perez of San Francisco in the form of a giant traveling spectacle called Life Size Mouse Trap. KRON4 described it at Maker Faire of 2014 as "a fantastically hand crafted, 16 piece, 50,000-lb. interactive kinetic sculpture set atop a 6,500-square-foot game board ... complete with a Vaudevillian style show, original musical score by the one woman band Esmerelda Strange, Sexy Mice can-can dancers, clown workers, acrobatic hijinks, and other spectacular scenes dedicated to the pursuit of spectacle-laden fun!"[17][18][19] It is hauled to fairs and events by 25 tons of cranes and equipment in a semi truck, it has a bowling ball instead of a ball bearing, and it ends in the destruction of a real automobile. The Mercury News said in 2016 "instead of trapping a rodent — they drop a huge old bank safe on a car. Sweet. ... It's all very awesome, a masterpiece of engineering. But kind of a bummer you can't actually play on it — as the ball."[20][21][22] Smithsonian Magazine reported the exhibit's merit in teaching physics and simple machines.[23]

• Crazy Machines and Crazy Machines 2

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Mouse Trap (game).

• Mouse Trap product page at Hasbro Games
• Mouse Trap at BoardGameGeek
• The original 1963 Mouse Trap box cover
• Life Size Mouse Trap