I was never a huge fan of board games, they always seemed so adult to me as a kid. That said, the Mouse Trap board game was the greatest board game no one actually had to play. This game was purely premised on kicking the marble and watching the machinery take over. And the trap itself is a masterpiece of game design that is intentionally designed to not consistently work. Setting the trap up and pulling the cheese wheel was the whole point, in my mind, and I love the detailed explanation of the trap offered in the Wikipedia article:
In a proper operation, the player turns the crank, which rotates a vertical gear, connected to a horizontal gear. As that gear turns, it pushes an elastic-loaded lever until it snaps back in place, hitting a swinging boot. This causes the boot to kick over a bucket, sending a marble down a zig-zagging incline which feeds into a chute. This leads the marble to hit a vertical pole, at the top of which is an open hand, palm-up, which is supporting a larger ball(changed later on to a marble just like the starter one). The movement of the pole knocks the ball free to fall through a hole in its platform into a bathtub, and then through a hole in the tub onto one end of a seesaw. This catapults a diver on the other end into a tub which is on the same base as the barbed pole supporting the mouse cage. The movement of the tub shakes the cage free from the top of the pole and allows it to fall.
I love the folks you tightened that description.
And the only way to get a sense of this game is to watch the video
And then there’s the real life Mouse Trap game:
Honestly, I have never played the actual game. Just setting it up and trapping a mouse was fun enough!