Base price: $30.
1+ players.
Play time: 15 – 30 minutes per case.
BGG Link
Buy on Amazon (via What’s Eric Playing?)
Logged plays: 4

Full disclosure: A review copy of MicroMacro Kids: Crazy City Park was provided by Hachette Boardgames / Edition Spielwiese.

Note: This is the kids’ version of MicroMacro! For some of the others, check out my Crime City, Full House, and All In reviews.

It’s been an incredible day, not for writing. Went to a concert last night and had to sleep most of the rest of the day, so almost no writing has happened at all. I’m making up for it now, though, so we’re going to hustle through a chunk of this. Bear with me. The next two (or more!) weeks are going to be pretty mystery, puzzle, and deduction games-heavy. One of my best buds is visiting and we have a lot to get through, so we’re going to crush our way through a ton of them today and tomorrow. One of them I’ve been waiting for for a while: the new kids’ version of MicroMacro: Crime City! So let’s check out MicroMacro: Crazy City Park!

In MicroMacro Kids: Crazy City Park, players are detectives and investigators exploring a town that’s got … a lot going on. Truly, a near impossible amount of things going on. There’s robots and superheroes and a really cool water slide. A treehouse and a beach, too? This is why we pay taxes: public works. Anyways, unfortunately, there are a lot of crimes as well. Your job is to solve these crimes! And solve the things that aren’t quite crimes, as well. Sometimes you just have to find a lost dog. To do any of those things, you’ll have to look closely at the map and trace the path of what’s going on. Did I mention that everything in town is happening at the same time? As with any of the MicroMacro games, it’s kind of all a temporal jumble. The past, the present, and the future all collide in the Crazy City Park! Will you be able to solve every mystery?

Contents

• Setup
• Gameplay
• Player Count Differences
• Strategy
• Pros, Mehs, Cons
• Overall

Setup

The setup here is virtually identical to other MicroMacro games, but there is a difference and that’s a point that I want to make about that.

Unfurl the map:

The key kicker here is that instead of case cards in little translucent envelopes, there’s a little book with all the cases and crimes and mysteries! You can flip to the one that you want to play.

You also get Detective Tokens! These aren’t quite the same as the MicroMacro magnifiers, but they’re still going to be useful, so set them aside.

Pick a case to choose and flip to it, and you’re ready to start! That simple.

Gameplay

Gameplay is identical to other MicroMacro games! To start a case, just follow the instructions on the page. As you do, the game will ask you questions that you need to answer by finding them in the map! Look for the people or things pictured to help. There will sometimes be hints for more complicated questions, as well. Have one player handle the book and read things aloud to the others.

When you think you’ve got the answer or you’ve got a step in the right direction, call it out! Place a Detective Token on it to keep an eye on it for later. As mentioned, everything in MicroMacro happens as the same time, so you’ll see people walking to and from an event as well as the event itself! You can use this to figure out where people live, what they were doing, or where they buried their crime money. All useful things to know.

After you’ve answered all the questions, the case is done! You can move on to another case or pack things up there, but with 22 cases (and more online), you’ll likely be entertained for a good bit with this one.

Player Count Differences

Not a ton, here, in my opinion. More people does solve one key problem, which is searching the grid. With more eyes you can find things more quickly. In older games, that wasn’t necessarily the most helpful, though, because you could find things that were a bit out of order and have to point to them or something. It’s a lot easier here with the Detective Tokens, though; you can very quickly and cleanly mark something on the map without making an actual mark, letting players more quickly zero in on what their partners were coming up with. I like it! It’s simple, hopefully low-cost, and extremely effective. Huge fan. It makes communication easier, it makes finding your lost spot easier, and it also looks pretty nice. I like the neon green of it all; it nicely jives with the monochromatic color scheme otherwise. As a result, not a ton of recommendations for player count; it depends on who you’re playing with and how easily you can stand around your table, I think.

Strategy

• Scan in both directions. The game will sometimes ask you to trace backwards to find out what happened in the past or trace forwards to find out what’s going to happen shortly. Both are challenging, but both are also useful so you can get a sense of the whole picture. The better you get at this, the easier the game will become.
• Use the Detective Tokens to help you keep track! This is so nice. You can use the Detective Tokens to essentially take a snapshot of a certain moment by placing them on top of something you don’t want to forget. They’re super easy to see through, too, which helps a ton. Use them to your advantage!
• Take turns looking at certain parts of the map so you don’t wear yourself out. At a certain point looking at the map from high up can make everything start to look the same and lose focus. You can fix that by regularly moving to other areas or quadrants to get a fresh perspective. You should do that at least every case.
• If you do multiple cases in one session, you may find that you get some help from a previous case. This isn’t really strategy as much as it is memory but you might see something that comes up for a different case while you’re working on your current one! We had that a lot with one particular case of food poisoning that comes up pretty late. It’s very funny, though.
• Communicate with your teammates. They can’t always see what you’re seeing or know exactly what’s up or what you’re doing, so tell them if you see things that are relevant (like the person in question) or look relevant (like finding one of two or three sausage / hot dog stands around town for a hot-dog-themed adventure. The more you all know, the better you will all do. Cooperation!
• Mark your Last Known Place as well. Two Detective Tokens on where you were searching for can be helpful, especially if the places and people start blending together.

Pros, Mehs, and Cons

Pros

• I vastly prefer the book to the cards. The case book is genuinely excellent. For one, it saves you all the annoying setup of splitting up the cards and putting them into each translucent envelope. It’s not that that’s not fun, it’s just that you risk spoiling major aspects of a case for yourself if you’re not careful, and it’s anyone’s guess as to whether or not you’ll remember it later.
• I also really like the Detective Tokens. I think I begged for them in a previous game, so it kind of feels like my wish got granted? I hope they make it into the other games in subsequent printings; they’re just so helpful for everything.
• I appreciate the low-stakes nature of the various cases in this game; it’s kind of nice that not everything is a murder. You’re solving hat thefts or chasing down a robot named Crime Octopus or helping a lady find her lost dog. Not everything is violent or sexual or both, which is kind of a nice emotional break from some of the other MicroMacro games. They’re still cute and goofy, but they can be kind of heavy, at times.
• I just really like the art style. It’s whimsical and pleasant, even when someone’s getting murdered (thankfully no murders here, as far as I can tell).
• Genuinely chuckled or laughed a few times during the game, as well. The art is whimsical, yes, but it’s also applied in a silly way. Is that a gun or a banana? Did someone throw a tree through a house? Why is someone else riding a horse? Some of those answers are extremely silly, and it shows that MicroMacro as a series isn’t above a bit of silliness where it services the gameplay, and that’s excellent.
• MicroMacro as a series has a lot of charm, and I’m glad that they’re expanding the reach of it. I think I just like the implementation a lot, and this does an excellent job prepping kids for the more challenging MicroMacro games without being inherently too easy or light. We still had to do a good bit of looking to find everything, and it got me excited to play Showdown, soon. I think you could very easily transition a kid from this to standard MicroMacro as long as you’re okay with the subject matter.

Mehs

• I mean, it’s much better if everyone is on the same side of a smaller table playing it so that players don’t have to constantly look from weird angles, but you do what you can with what you have. For this game, for instance, we let my friend who’s never played before take point. I’ll likely loan her the full set of the other four once we finish up with them if she’s interested. This meant that I spent a lot of time never really seeing the East side of the city because I was sitting on the far West side. I got to do a lot; just a bummer.

Cons

• The heavy creasing in the map continues to give me hives every time I play. I just get very stressed out that the map is difficult to lay perfectly flat, from an extremely type A perspective. To be fair to me, I’m consistent: I’ve expressed this same complaint for folded cloth maps, recently. I just want my gameplay area to lay flat on the table, and especially where characters may be on or near the creases, the less obvious distortion, the better.

Overall: 9 / 10

Overall, high marks to MicroMacro Kids: Crazy City Park! There’s a reason for this, I promise. It’s not just that MicroMacro Kids is every bit as fun as its, shall we say, more mature siblings (though it is and that’s worth saying!). It’s also that MicroMacro Kids is a great entry point into a fantastic series, and it’s extremely approachable. It’s extending you a hand and letting you go to a place where crime isn’t that serious before you have to start solving all the adorable little murders in Crime City. And it performs admirably. The cases that we worked on, even at the highest difficulty, were still lower-complexity (I think a 5-star Kids felt equivalent to a 3-star standard), but they were no less fun or well-written. There’s something to be said to the distinction between a kids’ game that’s just for kids and a game aimed at younger players that’s still fun for everyone. This is a game I wish I had when I was younger (this, ICECOOL, and Catch the Moon). I would have loved it. Plus, they even have coloring pages and extra missions online if you finish them all! I think this is one of the stronger entry points that I’ve seen in a while, and that’s great. Games are often measured just by what you get, but I think this was an ambitious concept to start off with, and they delivered quite nicely. There’s fun cases to solve, great art, a lot of whimsy, and improvements that I prefer to other games in the series. I would love a Big Case Book in all the other sets, as well. It’s so good. But if you’re looking for a great family game to solve crimes together, you crave more MicroMacro and you don’t care who knows it, or you just like a good puzzle, MicroMacro Kids: Crazy City Park is a fantastic first choice! Though, I have to say, now I’m extra curious about those MicroMacro jigsaw puzzles…

This one’s getting added to my Puzzle and Mystery Games Hub, so if you’re looking for more great games in that genre, check the hub for recommendations!

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