Haunted Mouse Review

Haunted Mouse is a card shedding game for 3-5 players. Players will be dealt 8 cards at the beginning of the game that they cannot rearrange. Players will take turns getting cards out of their hands by playing sets of like numbers or runs of sequential numbers, you must beat the previously played cards. The first player to get rid of all their cards gets pieces of cheese and once a player has collected 7 pieces of cheese they win. Players also have Bait and Traps that they can use, Bait is a card from a players hand that they have to put in front of them at the beginning of the round, any player can choose to take a Bait card and use it in the cards they play but by using it you are helping another player to get rid of cards. Traps are a set of the same 4 numbers but in 4 different colors or a run of 4 sequential cards of a single color, if you can get one of these they will beat anything that is currently on the board and allow you to play again.

The game production is very well done, with nice and cute art on all the cards. Plastic cheese pieces and double sided player boards to hold said cheese. The game does have a cute story involving child mice trying to wake themselves up from a bad dream. This and the cute animal art will make this popular with families and children, in my opinion. A friend of mine was particularly enamored with the art and overall theme.

The game is a good time, but these types of games have been hitting the market a lot recently and I must acknowledge that. Many of these games not only play similarly but have much the same rules. In reviewing this, I must ask myself what does this do differently or better than its competitors. And my honest opinion is : not much. The Bait and Trap are interesting in concept but they also add some more rules that can get confusing to newer players. When I am at a game day event and I need a quick game to play while killing time before I play a bigger game, I regularly pull out games like this. But nothing about this game would make me want to play it over the others I have. At the same time if someone pulled it out and said it was one of their favorites, I wouldn’t say no to playing it with them.

Overall while I think this is a fun family game, some of the extra mechanics will make this harder to teach. And when all you want is a quick pick up game I would go to other games of this style before this one 9 times out of 10.