Base price: $35.
1 – 4 players.
Play time: 15 – 45 minutes per case.
BGG Link
Buy on Amazon (via What’s Eric Playing?)
Logged plays: 3 

Full disclosure: A review copy of MicroMacro: Crime City – All In was provided by Hachette Boardgames.

Definitely just took my finger off of the Publish button because I realized I hadn’t written an intro yet. One of the many consequences of a deeply modular review design is that sometimes I get distracted, wander off to another part of the review to write it, and then completely forget that I didn’t finish the first thing that I was working on and then publish it without doing my due diligence and double-checking. That usually doesn’t happen but I’ve definitely left a paragraph open-ended, before. That said, rest assured that didn’t happen this time because I caught myself before I published. You can breath easy. We can get into the review proper, if you’d like, though. This one’s a favorite through and through: MicroMacro: Crime City – All In!

In MicroMacro: Crime City – All In, you’ve returned to this pit of sin to solve cases and save the population from a variety of highly-specific and deeply personal crimes, usually. There’s hats missing, a stolen mummy, some guy called The Hook Killer? And those are just some of the cases I’ve done. You’ll likely see a lot more before you finish, so don’t let me spoil or stop you. As usual, Crime City is a bit odd: everything happens at the same time, so as you trace a path through the city, you may see the same character multiple times as you follow their path. This path may become known to other, more nefarious characters as well, so you can follow them too if you need someone to chase. Will you be able to solve the new crime wave that’s just hit Crime City?

Overall: 9 / 10

Overall, I still love MicroMacro, and Crime City – All In is no exception! I think that, largely you’re eventually going to hit a point with this series that you, like me, realize that it’s either for you or it’s not. That said, there’s a lot of reasons to like it. For one, while it’s still got a lot of a puzzle vibe to it, it’s essentially a “Where’s Waldo?” with more aggressive subject matter. There’s a lot of crime. They’ve committed very fully to making the art style extremely goofy, though, which helps lighten the overall mood of the game. Like, at the end of the day, there’s a lot of murder, sex, and violence in the game, but they’re drawn in an extremely silly way, so it’s not quite as dark as it otherwise could be. It’s certainly not extremely child-friendly, but they have once again wisely marked the cases with symbols to allow you to make your own decisions if you are a parent playing with younger gamers.

This one is a bit harder, gameplay-wise, but there’s actually a decently-silly reason for that: there’s almost no water features in this one! This means you’ve got pure city, and they’ve worked to normalize that out a bit by adding some features like a horse track, a playground, and a mini-golf course. Personally, I think that’s kind of fun; you want some variety between the various quarters of Crime City, and this certainly helps. I didn’t really notice any major overall differences at the case level between the various games, but I will also note that it’s been a while since I’ve played the other two Crime City boxes and my memories of them are hazy at best. I feel comfortable and confident saying that they’re overall still pretty similar in scope, complexity, and thematic content. It’s mostly just … more, for the sake of people who want more. And it’s me; I’m people who want more, so I’m very satisfied. One thing that does consistently bug me is the size of the map, but that’s kind of a consequence of both the previous maps being the same size and a need to actually have a map that people can read. I’m okay with it, but it is a huge pain having to try and find a spot where this all works to play and photograph. The lighting temperature in my dining room was terrible, so I had to do a lot of photo editing to make these pictures even passable.

But yes, I think MicroMacro is cool as hell. It’s a really great game to play with more than one person since that lets you split the map and collaborate on finding the steps to the solution. I like its presentation style, as well: since everything on the map happens at the same time, there’s a lot of fun temporal play happening that messes with your sense of time and place while you’re trying to trace back a crime. This all makes me very excited for the fourth one (and, eventually, the combo box that uses the entire four-piece map at once), but I also see that there are jigsaw puzzles and a kids’ version, too! They’re really expanding the game family, but, I mean, you can do that when you’ve won a Spiel des Jahres; it’s almost expected. If you’re a fan of the MicroMacro series, you’re looking for a very visual crime-solving game, or you just like violent things happening to cute fake people, you’ll probably really enjoy MicroMacro: Crime City – All In! I can’t wait to play the next one.

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