Designed by: Johannes Sich
MicroMacro takes the Where’s Wally type challenge and attaches it to a narrative. Instead of finding one thing, you’re looking for several. Instead of a board – here a vast, fold-out paper map – representing a snapshot of time, it contains several snapshots: characters paths can be traced through the city as they navigate to and from various places, intent on surprisingly nefarious deeds. Although the art style is friendly, the crime cases you solve in the game are anything but!
As well as the map itself, there’s several cards in the box which separate out into several crime cases to solve (don’t look at the backs of the cards!). The game plays very simply – the first card in each case sets up the mystery, and the second gives you something to look for on the map. Once you’ve found it, you can flip the second card and read the back, which will confirm (hopefully) you were correct, and then the third card develops the case further: it might involve ‘following’ someone around the map, or tailing a car, or locating a clue, but always the case is solved by finding things on the map, which then lead you to other places on the map, and eventually getting to the bottom of a robbery, mugging or murder!
When all the crimes are solved, the game is ‘played out’ – but there’s nothing to stop you passing it on to a friend. Or hanging it on the wall!
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The opening cases are super-simple, but they do get a little more complex. If you're feeling ambitious you can simply read the first card to a case and - in true detective style - try and work out the entirety of the case from that!
Unfortunately once you've completed all the cases, the replay value depends on you having a foggy memory. But they're fun while they last.
1-4
Players
10+
Years
15-30
Mins
Sam says
Something of an oddity, combining child-friendly art and child-appealing gameplay (find stuff!) with some quite brutal crimes. There's no viscera or anything, but it's quite the incongruous pairing, with corpses littering the streets and a fetish club central to one particular case . But it's fun: my son and I enjoyed searching, finding, connecting and figuring things out as the puzzles went from super-easy to slightly more complicated. It's not a game I'd rhapsodise over, but as a quirky, different gaming experience to the norm, it's enjoyable and to be fair, we ripped through all the cases in a couple of weeks!