Trampoline Mouse Strategy: Cat Timing, Safe Springs and Fast Clears

Updated October 2026

Trampoline Mouse looks like a chase game, but nothing in it chases you. The cats walk fixed back-and-forth beats, the trampolines never move, and every swipe takes a known number of milliseconds. That makes it a timing puzzle you can actually plan. This guide sets out the exact layout, how fast everything moves, what each level is worth, and the floor patterns that decide whether a level goes smoothly or eats your lives.

The building, cell by cell

The play area is a grid seven cells wide and five floors tall. You start each level in the middle of the ground floor, and the bell hangs in the middle of the top floor. The three floors in between are where the action happens: each of them holds exactly three coins, dropped on three different cells chosen at random from the inner columns that can be reached safely (more on that below). Nine coins per level, never on the ground or the roof, and never on the two outer columns.

Those outer columns are special. Every floor has a trampoline at its far left and far right cell, and those are the only places you can change floor. A vertical swipe anywhere else does nothing at all, so a level is really a choice of which side to climb on and when to step off the springs into the room.

The ground floor and the roof never have cats. The cats live only on the three coin floors, and they turn around at the second and sixth cells, so they never step onto a trampoline column. Standing on a spring is therefore completely safe, for as long as you like.

Movement timing you can count on

A sideways swipe moves you exactly one cell and takes 110 milliseconds. An up or down swipe on a spring sends you one floor and takes 340 milliseconds. You cannot queue a second command while one of these animations is running; the game simply ignores it. A drag only counts once your finger has travelled about 16 pixels, and if you keep dragging after a step completes, every further 16 pixels can trigger the next step, so one long sweep of the thumb can walk you several cells.

The single most useful fact in the game is this: while you are in the air between floors you cannot be caught. Contact is not checked at all during a bounce. Combined with the safe springs, it means every floor change is a free action. All of your risk is in the walking.

Contact itself is generous but not sloppy. You lose a life when a cat on your floor is within about two thirds of a cell of you, measured on the actual animated positions, so a cat that is halfway through a step counts as halfway between its two cells. Walking past a cat, or letting one walk past you, always ends in a touch. There is no way to slip through.

How the cats move

Each cat takes one step every so often and reverses when it reaches the end of its patrol. On level 1 a step takes 800 milliseconds. Every level shaves 60 milliseconds off that, until it bottoms out at 380 milliseconds from level 8 onward. A full lap, from one end of the patrol to the other and back, is eight steps: about 6.4 seconds on level 1 and about 3 seconds at top speed.

Cat numbers grow too. Levels 1 and 2 have two cats, levels 3 and 4 have three, and from level 5 there are four. From level 12 another cat joins every four levels. Cats are assigned to random floors, with at most two per floor until the total climbs past six.

What matters more than the count is where each cat is in its walk. Every cat starts at its own random point of its patrol and glides at the level's pace, so two cats on the same floor walk at the same speed but out of step with each other, and the open cells near each spring come and go with that rhythm.

Reading a floor before you step off

Before leaving a spring, look at where the cat on that floor is and which way it faces. A cat walking away from you is the green light. If it has just turned at your end, wait. If it is walking away, you have roughly as many steps as its distance from the far end, plus the steps it needs to come back, before it reaches you again.

Because walking (110 ms per cell) is far faster than any cat step, you can almost always grab a coin two or three cells in and get back to your spring inside one cat lap. The trick is to go in on the cat's way out, not its way back. Never plan to cross the whole floor to the other spring while a cat is on it; you would have to pass the cat, and that is a guaranteed hit.

To reach coins on the far side of a cat, use another floor as a corridor. Bounce down to a floor with no cat, or all the way to the cat-free ground floor, walk across there, and climb the springs on the other side. Each bounce costs 340 ms, and a full corridor walk of six cells costs 660 ms, which is cheap compared with a lost life.

Every level can be cleared

Each level is checked by a solver as it is built. For every coin, the game confirms that at some point in the cats' cycle you can step off a spring, collect it and get back onto a spring without touching a cat, and coins are only placed on cells that pass. If the cats on a floor leave fewer than three such cells, the cats are dealt again. A coin may still ask for patience — standing on the spring until the right moment in the cycle comes round — but it never requires a sacrificed life.

Losing a life still has one use: you reappear on the ground floor and are untouchable for 1.2 seconds. That is enough to walk to a spring and bounce up one floor, but not a reliable way to grab coins, so treat it as recovery rather than a plan.

Clock, lives and scoring

The first level gives you 90 seconds. The clock and the cats start with your first swipe. When you ring the bell, whatever time you had left carries over, and clearing levels 1 to 4 adds 30 seconds on top. From level 5 the bonus drops by three seconds a level (27, 24 and so on) and from level 14 there is none, so the most time a run can ever have is 345 seconds. The clock runs on real time, so leaving the tab or locking the phone does not pause it. You have three lives for the whole run; a hit takes one, keeps every coin you have already picked up, and puts you back on the ground floor after a short pause.

Each coin is worth 50 points, so a level's coins come to 450. Ringing the bell adds 500 plus 100 times the level number you just cleared, so level 1 pays 600 and level 10 pays 1,500. The bell bonus soon dwarfs the coins, which is why clearing levels matters more than anything else. The bell only accepts you after the last coin is gone, so there is no reason to visit the roof early.

Fast clears are what keep a run alive. In our simulation, a frame-perfect route took a median of about 5.8 seconds on level 1, about 7.5 seconds once the cats reach top speed and about 9 seconds by level 30 as more cats join. Early levels bank time, but with the bonus shrinking from level 5 and gone from level 14, even that perfect player runs out of clock around level 42. Human swipes are slower than that, so every second saved on the first levels counts.

A route that works most of the time

1. From the start, walk three cells to whichever spring is on the side away from the nearest cat on the lowest coin floor.
2. Climb one floor at a time. On each coin floor, stand on the spring, wait for the cat to head away, dart in for the near coins and come back.
3. Note any coins you could not reach and which side they are on. Pick them up on the way down a corridor floor, or by switching sides on the ground floor.
4. Make your last coin pickup end near a spring, then bounce up to the roof and walk three cells to the bell.

Your best score is saved on the device, and any score above zero can be sent to the Hall of Fame from the game-over card.