Mouse Trap Game Parts History - How has the game changed?

MOUSE TRAP Game Parts History

This article is in phase 1: information will be updated as it is found.

I have always wanted to learn more about the classic Mouse Trap game, but never had them in my collection.  Recently I was finding them at sales and decided to add them to my collection.  The reason I steered clear of these games is that most of them are missing pieces and I did not have the time to find the parts.  I got the urge after finding the Ideal 1970 Mouse Trap Game to see if I could start a series showing all of the different versions and what has changed through the years. As I started researching the game, I wanted to start from the beginning and see when the first Mouse Trap Game came out.  This led me to a daily search online and every time I went to a thrift store or estate sale, I would buy whatever version I could find.  Currently I have every version except 3 from the 18 total that I have found.

My intention was never to own every Mouse Trap, or to do the history of the game itself, but to document the available sets through-out the years.  Through that documentation of each set, I wanted to study the parts and game play to determine how the game has changed. 

My research is based on owning most of the games, Google images, and various other web sites to make my comparison and timeline below.  There may be some variances in the years, but after countless hours of searching, I have narrowed it down to the years that have the most copies online.  The other resource is Board Game Geek which is missing information, including many of the games in my timeline below.

This takes me to the first mouse trap game in 1963 by Ideal, which I found complete in the original box.  Being the first set, it gave me the start of the timeline of every set produced since then.  Here is a breakdown of the years they were produced and by which company.  From 1963 to 1984 Ideal was the manufacturer. From 1986 to 2005 Milton Bradley had the rights to the game and from 2016 to 2022 Hasbro was making the game.  I have not seen any new games since 2022 and a recent trip to Target in 2025, they were selling the 2021 set on shelves.  The 2022 game had a slight name change to “Mouse Trap Escape Game”, which is hard to find. There are not many on eBay.  I want to make sure I mention that the years I have given were from the boxes and instructions and not documented by any manufacturer's internal information.  There may be a year or two of variance with my research.  There may also be versions of the game yet to find which will be updated on this list if and when they are found.

Here is a run down by the years of what I have noticed about the game.  The 1963, 1970 and 1975 games by Ideal all had a spring activated helping hand Oddly, the 1986 game by Milton Bradley reintroduced the spring.  It was only used for four years. (Note below) The game board Ideal used was the same board artwork for the 1963, 1970, 1975 and 1978 games.  The only difference is the 1963 game board is larger than subsequent years.  In 1982 and 1985 the game board changed colors and design.  The board changed multiple times after that.  

All of the sets from 1963 to 1984 had a cage post with a little toothpick size plastic tip piece holding the basket. (The 1986, 1989, 1994 and 1996 Milton Bradley games had the same toothpick size plastic tip piece) You will find this broken on a lot of games because it was pretty fragile.  It was not until 1986 Milton Bradley started producing the game and they changed the design to strengthen the tip with a flatter thicker support.

The Game Balls - Bath Tub

The 2 Balls that you normally see in the game have also changed through the years.  All of the Ideal games had a larger colored ball and a smaller metal ball.  Here are the colors I have seen for the larger ball; white, grey, yellow, black, red, green, pink, blue, orange and brown.  There are shade variances in those colors.   The box art on all of the Ideal games had different color balls, for example, 1963 had a white ball, 1970 to 1978 had a blue ball, 1982 had a yellow ball and the last Ideal game had a pink ball.  It is interesting to note that the 1994 game had an orange ball and the 1999 game had a yellow ball even though they switched to two metal balls in 1994.  With the changes in 1994 to two metal balls, the bathtub also changed because the hole did not need to be as large as it was for the larger ball. With all that said, the color ball on the box did not always match the ball that was inside the game.

The Lamp Post

The shape and design of the lamp did not change until 2005 at the end of Milton Bradley and into Hasbro’s time of making the game.  The hanging down part of the lamp was much bigger and less prone to breaking when Milton Bradley updated it.  The little swirl design which you see on every lamp post was finally updated  in 2016 and 2021, with a flat swirl and a different looping design.

It was not until the 1984 Ideal game that cheese was added to the game.  This changed the game play and the rules were updated because now you may use cheese pieces later in the game to help you spring the trap on your opponents' mice.  It adds a diabolical element to the game and something you may need to do to win the game.

The Cheese

The cheese also changed after 1986 in the design.  The 1984, 1986 and 1994 games had black printing on it for the holes in the cheese. Later in 2005 they changed the color and design to brown printing for the holes with a better looking image of the cheese.  The size of the cheese changed in the 2016 and newer games from Hasbro to a larger piece.  The cheese was also used differently for the Hasbro games.  The new rules are to collect 6 cheeses to win the game.  More below on the mechanics of the game and how even the way the cheese was used had changed the game-play.

Game Part Colors

All of the other plastic parts in the game vary from year to year and set to set probably because they would use inventory from earlier games because they were the same parts.  From what I can tell, there was never one consistent color scheme that was the same for every year.  There are three exceptions.  The wash tub & bucket have always been yellow and the mouse catching basket has mostly been red.  I have seen an orange basket used by Milton Bradley.  I can’t even say for certain that the 1963 version had all of the same colors of parts from game to game, because I have seen different colored crank handles and hands in online images.  Unless we were able to open sealed original games, we will never know the consistency of colors of the original 1963 game..  This would suggest that the manufacturers may have just ordered certain color parts on the first release and maybe on subsequent releases they changed colors.  Then when it was time to make new games, they just grabbed the parts they needed regardless of trying to adhere to the same colors.

The Mice

Don’t forget the mice!  They remained the same shape and color (red, green, yellow and blue (there are color shade differences; light green vs. dark green) for all of the sets I mentioned earlier in the time-line until 2005 the last release for Milton Bradley to a chunky more stand-up minifigure.  Hasbro changed them again, but they were a similar style to the 2005 game prior from Milton Bradley but even more chunky in size.

The Rubber Band

We should take a brief moment and mention the rubber band.  It applies the pressure on the stop sign which is triggered by spinning the crank and moving the gears, which kicks the boot.  I have never seen an original 1963 rubber band, so I can’t give the exact original size, but subsequent versions are about a 1.25” to 1.50” rubber band. (That is the round measurement, not stretched or oval)

Stairway

One other item that changed, but only from the 1963 Ideal version is the stairway.  In the 1963 version the stairway is open on the back of the stairs (riser) while all other versions after have a solid set of stairs.

The Diver

One last thing that I have noticed is the diver on the diving board.  He is always pictured on the boxes facing the yellow bucket, but the instructions all tell you to face him the other way.  The diver also is in a variety of colors including red, blue, yellow, and green. 

Game-play mechanics

I thought it would be helpful to give you a basic run-down of the game mechanics based on the timeline.  In the Ideal versions up to the 1978 version, they say the game is for 1-4 players, but there is no mention of how you play with one player.  I can speculate that you just set up the trap and triggered the reaction for fun, which is what a lot of kids did with the game.   From 1963 to 1978 the game started by having all of the Mouse Trap game pieces organized by color on the game table near the game board with all of the mice at the start line.  Each person rolls the die and does the action on the space they land on.  You needed to land on a white space to add a piece of the mouse trap to the game board.  The step-by-step placement of each piece is on the instruction sheet.  The game path inevitably leads to a looping circle where the mice either get trapped or escape.  Once a player reaches this area, they just roll and continue to travel in the circle.  Once someone lands on the cheese, and an opponent lands on “Turn Crank” that is when you trigger the trap by turning the crank handle.  There are times the trap does not fall or something in the system fails to operate, which in those cases will allow the mouse to escape to the next space without waiting for his turn.  The player that just triggered the trap is also the player that must reset it.  House rules may come in handy if the basket does not completely cover the mouse, or maybe just his tail.  As the balls are moving around the mice may naturally move a little and they may not get completely covered by the basket.  I would predetermine that prior to starting and or make that clear at the beginning.

The 1984 Ideal (no longer 1-4 players but 2-4 players) and 1986 Milton Bradley game boards changed to a blue background and a completely new artwork. The basic game changed in that new spaces were added with the numbers “2” - “2-3” and “2-3-4” which is based on the number of players in the game.  If there are 3 players and you land on a “2” then no pieces are added to the building of the mouse trap.  A major change to the game is the addition of cheese pieces (cards).  The “Collect” and “Lose” cheese spaces were also added to the game board.  As I mentioned earlier, once the mice are in the loop and a player lands on “Turn Crank” with no one on the “Cheese Space”, he can return a cheese piece to the pile and force an opponent to roll the die to hopefully get them to land on the cheese space inevitably trapping them.  This is a diabolical twist to the game.  He can keep doing this as long as he has cheese pieces.  There are other cheese related rules and spaces on the game board which must be followed throughout the game.

In 2016 Hasbro completely changed the game board, Mouse Trap pieces and the way the game is played. No longer do you slowly build the Mouse Trap, but instead set it up at the beginning.  There are other rules and special instances, but the “Loop” is no longer part of the game and you just keep going around the game board until you get 6 pieces of cheese.  This version of the game is actually one of the harder to assemble and in 2021 they updated the pieces to make that easier.  The game-play in 2021 is the same as 2016.

The 2022 version is a scaled down version of the game with only three players and limited Mouse Trap pieces to build.  As of writing this, I have not played the game or even taken it out of the box. 

It would be important to note other products with the name Mouse Trap, here are some; Mouse Trap Card Game, Lucky Leprechaun Mouse Trap, Various World’s Smallest Mouse Traps, Mouse Trap Puzzle, Mouse Trap Key Chains, McDonald’s Happy Meal Mouse Trap, Elefun and Friends Mouse Trap, U-Build Mouse Trap Game, Various Mouse Trap Console Games, and finally how can we forget to mention Mouse Trap Toilet!  They had to go there didn’t they?

Side Note:  For whatever reason Milton Bradley’s 1986 version was reintroduced with the spring, large & small balls and NO cheese in the game.  It is the closest to the 1963  Ideal game with the spring and two ball sizes.  I’m going to make a conjecture that the 1986, 1989, 1994 and 1996 Milton Bradley games were not for the US market.  There are very few if any on the US eBay website, but the UK eBay has a bunch.  They also all had the large ball and small metal ball.  The 1994 Milton Bradley US Edition Mouse Traps Game had 2 metal balls.  The artwork for the two 1994 Milton Bradley games is different.  There may also be a 1997 version that was on the UK market with the blue cover and cat sitting on the top left corner area of the box cover.  All of the UK games had the cat sitting in the top left corner.