This game needs to be heavily supervised. Even if you child can read (and kids on the younder end of the spectrum won't be able to), assembling the mousetrap requires a certain amount of fine motor skills and an understanding of how things fit together. My son has yet to play it with a friend without serious assistance! Even when I play if with him, it is a crisis if my younger child is around. He is too young to play the game, but he loves to play with it and work the trap -- usually right in the middle of the game!
Notwithstanding all of this, the game is a blast. It's a good introduction to engineering concepts. Most board games are pretty similar -- you go around the board and whoever gets to the end first wins. This isn't that simple - you don't know who is going to win until the end. Furthermore, the best fun of the game is the process of reaching the end, since most turns involve a child adding another piece onto the trap.
My only real complaint about the game is that it needs to be sturdier. My board is taped together, and I am about to order a replacement thing-a-majig (that's really the name of the piece) from Hasbro.
If you don't mind supervising the game, it's a great game.
I know that "Mousetrap" is a game in which players take turns trying to capture an opponent's mice, but I am going to take a radical position and say the whole point here is to build this Rube Goldberg version of the proverbial "better mousetrap" and get it to work. Yes, the first time or two that you play this with your kids you can follow the rules and declare a winner. But from then on the fun is just putting this contraption together and getting it to work. The important thing here is that they understand the whole idea of a "Rube Goldberg machine" (he was the inspiration for this toy, even if he does not get the actual credit) and to appreciate the idea of taking a simple every-day real-life problem such as catching a mouse and solving it with a complicated mechanical solution such as what we have here, where you begin with a shoe kicking a bucket and eventually, if everything works correctly, ends with trapping a mouse.
This is a game where the way it really works is that young kids want to learn how to put the "Mousetrap" together and get it to work. After they master that skill they will become bored with it, at which point you simply discover some new kids who have yet to be exposed to this unique, classic game. There are certain games that every kid should be exposed to and "Mousetrap" is on that short list of classics.
