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.