MicroMacro: Crime City Review - Big Trouble In Little City

it's time for crime and you're invited in this game pegasus spieler has finally brought the criminal mastermind known as wally to justice by trapping all of his most anti-social urges in one large paper city and by that i mean where's no wally here but his spirit possesses this box like a crime ghost you and probably one friend or one child are going to use this magnifying glass these cards and this giant map over here to solve all kinds of terrible not life anymores and it is hard to overstate how large this impossibly detailed map really is it's bigger than my table just look at it next to us and somewhere buried within this giant map are dozens of cases for you to solve sleuthing and deducing your way through the lives of the tiny denizens in this disorientingly huge world so how do you play well first off all the cards in this game are split into sets or cases and each one will start by showing you exactly where a body is and then ask you a number of questions as to how that body came to book an appointment at dr death's haunted practice using your wits deduction and big bulging eyes you're going to discover exactly how this deed came to pass see unlike a where is wally micro macro gives you a huge map of non-linear time everything on this map has happened will happen or is currently happening depending on how when or where you choose to look at it think of it as though time was laid on top of time a sort of triple layer time lasagna where things are stuck in physical perpetuity but also going backwards or forwards depending on the angle you're looking at it from now if that all sounded confusing i promise you it's not i've just made it sound that way for entertainment purposes as i often do but to get this review back on its rails how about we take a look at the very first case in the box now to avoid spoilers this is only one of 16 cases and it is hilariously simple and easy so i would encourage you to not care about spoilers trust me famous television detective there's no big mystery here but you can skip to timestamp if you want to avoid it max gland is the king of crime city and he's off to buy some new loafers with the money he embezzled from the orphanage i promise this is canon and i'm not just making it up but before he buys the loafers he's off to sink a cup of beer from the pub but there's been a disaster because he's lost his lovely lovely hats that's a crime and we've gotta solve it tracing his route back we can see he enjoyed a swasaj at the swasaj stand and look the hat is firmly perched atop his bongs and if we ogle the route between the swasaj stand and the pub we can see these nerdu wells perching in a tree ready to hoik the hat from his head the two rascals are sitting on that park bench enjoying their prize congratulations detective you have solved a bad crime and that is case number one closed now you probably thought that was very simple and yes soon murder does enter the picture but hopefully that gave you a rough idea of how the crimes work in this game and how you solve them you're scanning the map answering questions making deductions and tracing activities and all that is so intuitive that just reading through the first case teaches you the game and look at that the teach is over and we're only [Music] uh four minutes and six seconds into the review so far look here's the bottom line micro macro crime city fits in the just nice category there's nothing here that's going to blow your mind or change your world it's all very solvable and very sweet if by sweet you mean solving someone's one-way visit to the no zone but despite micro macro being a little easy and a tad predictable it is joyous as a thing please allow me to wax lyrical about it starting with a section i'm gonna call wise wally a common complaint about this game that i have almost entirely made up for the purposes of this review is that it is just a where's wally my fictional friend micro macro crime city is to where's wally as wears wally is to looking at dust here's the skinny where's wally asks you to find the thing and sadistically hides the thing amongst a million other things finding the thing is a singular moment of joy in an ocean of sure some of the illustrations you peek at along the way will make you or maybe even but because those illustrations are fixed points in time they are all payoff no setup crime city is just plain better because it's asking you to find a bunch of the thing in a logical sequence it's asking you to find a story rather than a singular moment it's asking you to spend more time scanning this map for anything useful not just a specific pattern of color and by asking you to properly scan deduce and focus you're absorbing loads more lovely details because they might be related to the case and that's cool and that not only goes for the case itself but also the little side chuckles and strange stories that you see along the way that just aren't related at all and never will be and that's genius and sometimes you'll scan a detail in one case thinking it completely irrelevant but mentally log it in your brain only for that exact detail to become incredibly relevant a lot later on in a more important case and that is genius and do you know what greases the wheels of all of that let's talk about the illustration all of the artwork in this game is endlessly charming as well as being cutely macabre the amount of stuff not to do with the case is delicious the care in which the small stuff is sweated shows a joy and affection that has gone into this thing the endless spirals of detail and charm makes this game into something that i want to frame or even better than framing it pass it on give it to a friend play it with your family play it with your significant other show them that your boring hobby is not as boring and is more accessible than you might first think with other games you've got a time investment you've got a sync that players need to get invested in the game and learn rules and complications each time with micro macro you can start playing instantly and the elevator pitch is what if wears wally but while he's dead i'm in and get this if they like that they'll be able to buy more of it there's a sequel in the works at the moment be still my criminal heart and you know a sequel might be what's needed to push this game over into being a recommendation because as it stands as much as i like this thing there are a couple of sticky points that i want to talk about first up let's talk about player count this box advertises this game as for between one and four players my recommendation is that this is a two player game with three at a push the reason being is that if you have more than that quickly the game becomes a kind of crime twister and heaven knows nobody wants that and playing it solo is kind of sad the joy in this game is the revelations and sharing them with the other players around the table if it's your bag i'm not going to yuck you yum but i do think that it shines at two secondly i do wish that some of these cases got a little bit fruitier or messed with the formula a bit more they do of course build in complexity but there's nothing that made me go oh that's clever but lastly and maybe most personally i want to talk about whether you can play this game with smalls childlets or children's so this is a bit that i feel weirdly invested in because this kind of thing was absolutely my jam as a child i would have gone bonkers for this kind of thing i love the little detailed cities and spying all the little people going around their daily business it was my thing so much so that i used to draw weird little detailed city things this is literally it's not a goof this is one of my actual childhood drawings i love this kind of thing so i sort of wish that micro macro had toned down some of its more adult themes so that parents would feel more comfortable putting it in front of kids like me explaining motives for some of the murder here might be hard to directly be doing to a child and maybe lead you into having conversations that you might not be entirely ready to have with your kid yet for entirely different reasons to the murder itself now of course this box does say ages 12 plus on the cover and i think for most people that's the kind of age range you'd expect to have these slightly squirm inducing conversations but still you'd like to know that going in to some extent i mean having that kind of thing sprung upon you while you're playing a little fun family board game i mean you're relaxing it's a weekend it's something you don't want to have to worry about and i think what i'm getting at here is that the gameplay promise for micro macro is delightfully suitable for kids but that juicy feast for the eyes clashes with the themes that are variably suitable and to that end i am gonna put some variably minor spoilers for suitability underneath the video description so if you are a concerned parent worried about whether you can play this game with your kid or whether you'd be comfortable playing with a younger kid or an older kid or whatever that's all going to be in the video description if you want to read through that and check if there are some cases that you might want to avoid or if you want to sidestep the game in its entirety it'll be there and i also think that the sequel said somewhere this is very tenuous don't believe me that they're gonna have little warnings on some of the cards so they're making sure that you're prepared to talk about the thing in the case with your child which is good if any of that doesn't apply to you then i reckon you should go ahead and get this game it's joyous it's fun it's silly it's light it's nice and it's cheap and shareable it is just good and that's definitely worth something in board games and that is the end of this review and i've got a really long one to do next so i'm going to pack this all away and see you next time bye

Channel: Shut Up & Sit Down

Views: 88,325

Rating: 4.9494238 out of 5

Keywords: Shut Up and Sit Down, SUSD, SU&SD, Board Game Review, Review, Board Games, Board Gaming, Boardgame, Board Game, Gaming, Tabletop, Fun Games, Tom Brewster, Micro Macro, Crime City

Id: y8dGKPrUnhg

Length: 11min 39sec (699 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 16 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/BloodyCuts]

I’ve loved playing this with my kids. Rules take seconds to learn and it’s so much fun solving the puzzles/crimes.

Only issue I have is the longevity of the game. We’ve flown through the first 10 or so puzzles.

[u/Danwarr]

TIL Waldo is called Wally in the Commonwealth.

[u/Im_Not_That_Smart_]

Does anyone here know roughly how long it takes to beat the game / complete all the quests?

[u/thekingofthejungle]

$25 at my FLGS. Very tempted...

[u/WakingMind407]

I've been interested in this game for months but refuse to buy a scalped copy ($60 on Amazon right now). Is it just easier to acquire in Europe and England?

I thought this would be a $15 to $20 box at most.

[u/Mattyweaves19]

I love this game. So much so my wife and I have had three cases left for two months because we don't want to be done with.

I wish there were expansions rather than a new game coming out.

[u/flouronmypjs]

Well this review's timing makes me doubly glad that I snagged a copy the other day as soon as it came back in stock at my local online game store. Very excited to dive in to this game.

[u/BogeyBogeyBogey]

Ah. So this is what it feels like to want a game that has been hard to find and then SU&SD review it. Dang. It's gonna add to the trouble of finding it.

[u/AegisToast]

Dang it! I’ve been waiting for a good price for it, and now, if I don’t move fast, they’ll be sold out for a while.

Go review games I’m not already planning on buying!