Inspector Mouse: The Great Escape is a new memory board game for kids from HABA.
The convicts are planning a jailbreak! Kids will work as detectives to figure out which crook in the cell escaped the jail.
Memory board games like Inspector Mouse: The Great Escape are a great way to help kids exercise and improve their working memory which will help them in their educational journey and beyond!
How Do You Play Inspector Mouse?
The game is played within the box by assembling a rotating jail cell structure. The inside of the box is broken up into different rooms, with one room having the alarm bell. When a criminal’s cell is rotated above this room, they drop from their cell and hit the bell causing it to ding.
On their turn, players will roll the die to determine which direction they will rotate the jail cells. You’ll rotate the board until the entrance to the jailhouse is empty or the alarm sounds.
When an empty slot opens up, players stop rotating the board, and add a criminal tile into the slot so everyone can see which criminal it is. Players must now try to remember where this criminal is in relation to the criminals already in the jailhouse. Around the board are small holes so players can catch glimpses of criminals as they rotate around to help them remember.
When the game board is rotated so a criminal escapes and the alarm sounds, the game stops. Players now try to deduce which crook escaped by placing their magnifying glass on the image of the character.
If they get it right, they receive a star and remove the identified criminal from the game.
If they get it wrong, the crook is added to the getaway car.
The game ends when either the getaway car is full and the crooks drive off or the last criminal is placed into the jailhouse.
Everyone counts their stars and the player with the most stars wins.
What Do We Think of Inspector Mouse?
Inspector Mouse puts a unique spin (literally!) on classic memory games in a way that is really fun and exciting for players. Our kids loved listening for the alarm bell. (Three cheers for a game that encourages kids to be quiet! Hip! Hip! Shhhh!)
I love that this is more than your simple grid based memory game where you are just trying to make matches. Players really have to work hard to correctly hold the location of all the characters in the jailhouse — especially as they spin it back and forth between turns. It’s not as simple as remembering an A-B-C-D order, you also have to remember it backwards as well.
Criminals that were once considered at the “front” of the line in the jail cells immediately become the “back” of the line when the board moves the other direction. Holding the placements of the characters in the line while also adding new characters and losing others to escapes can be very tricky. Even for adults.
Adjustable Difficulty
The rules provide ways to easily adjust the difficulty. This really is a unique style of memory game and it’ll take kids some practice to develop ways to hold the information in their short term memory.
You can easily scale the difficulty down by not playing with all 15 criminals. This is how I recommend playing for your first game — especially with younger kids around age 5 or so. Our 4 year old son struggled with this one and required more adult help than his older siblings. I think the suggested age of 5 is a good starting point for this game.
You can also increase the difficulty in a few ways when your detectives are feeling extra sleuthy. I personally like the Who is the Boss rule where you place a single criminal face down in the drivers seat of the car as the “Mastermind.” After the game ends you have to make a guess at who is the criminal mastermind behind all these jailbreaks! If you guess correctly you get two stars.
How Does the Game Hold Up?
The design of the game is really clever, but you may be wondering, with all these moving parts, how does the game hold up to kids?
Kids are often rough on games. We’ve found that the wheel/turning system thing works relatively well. So long as kids don’t jostle it too much, the character chips stay in place when you lift the game up. The only thing we added was a stand for the mouse. The game has you place a single piece of cardboard for the mouse to balance on as you turn the board. It worked in theory but in practice with kids the mouse kept falling off. Luckily there are lot of cardboard pieces leftover from punching the game out. (We always recommend holding onto these until at least after your first play to make sure you don’t need them — and this is why!)
We took one of those circle pieces and super glued it to the cardboard stand to provide a more stable base for the mouse. It worked great and we now have no issues.
Our single complaint with the whole game however is the paper detective sheets that show the mugshots. Incredibly flimsy and bending with the softest touch I fear they will not last long before being damaged. The paper sheets are a relatively important part of the game as the kids will use them to secretly make their guesses for who escaped the jail. You’ll want to be extra careful with these.
Summary
Inspector Mouse: The Great Escape is an adorable memory game that would be great on any kids’ game shelf. It’s fun to play with the whole family and can be a challenge for everyone.
I highly recommend every kid have a good selection of memory games to choose from. Because of the unique way it challenges kids’ ability to hold and keep information ordered in their mind, Inspector Mouse gets two thumbs up from me!
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A special thank you to our friends at HABA for sending a copy of Inspector Mouse: The Great Escape for review. As always, our thoughts and opinions are our own.
Game Info:
Title: Inspector Mouse: The Great Escape
1-4 Players Ages 5+
Designer: Markus Nikisch
Artist: Valeska Scholz
Publisher: HABA
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