Find the clues and solve the cases!
What Is MicroMacro Kids: Crazy City Park?
MicroMacro Kids: Crazy City Park is a search-and-find game for 1 or more players, ages 6 and up, and takes about 15 to 45 minutes to play each case. It retails for $29.99 and is available in game stores or directly from Hachette Boardgames USA. It’s similar to its predecessors, but this time the cases are kid-friendly: no murder, drugs, or sex (though there’s still a bit of thievery). The only limit on the number of players is that it can get crowded with a lot of people hovering over the map.
MicroMacro Kids: Crazy City Park was designed by Johannes Sich and published by Edition Spielwiese, with illustrations by Daniel Goll, Tobias Jochinke, and Johannes Sich. It is distributed in the US by Hachette BoardgamesUSA, who provided me with the review copy.
MicroMacro Kids: Crazy City Park Components
The game includes:
- Fold-out map
- Investigator book
- 20 Detective tokens
The map is similar to the original games: it’s quite large, at 75x55cm (about 30″x21″), with a black-and-white isometric view of a city. There’s a large park that takes up most of the center of the map, but there’s plenty of other things as well, like a market and various other businesses, some residential areas, and even a bit of the beach. The illustration is chock-full of people (some with animal heads), vehicles, buildings, and all sorts of other little details, akin to a Where’s Waldo? book. The map isn’t quite as large as the original MicroMacro games, but it’s still a decent size with lots to look at.
The investigator book replaces the little envelopes of cards from the original MicroMacro games. Instead of a stack of cards for each case, all 22 cases are in this spiral-bound notebook. It’s a lot easier to use than the cards, both for the gameplay and for the ease of clean-up. You don’t have to worry about putting all the cards back in order and into the right envelopes afterward.
The detective tokens are new to this edition as well: they’re just transparent green plastic disks that you can place on the map to mark things you’ve found. It’s a simple idea, but makes it so much easier to track things while you’re working on a case, so it’s a welcome addition.
The one thing you won’t find is a magnifying glass, which has been included in previous editions. Maybe they figured kids have better eyesight than adults? I certainly wouldn’t have minded having one included.
How to Play MicroMacro Kids: Crazy City Park
The Goal
The goal of the game is to solve the cases by finding things on the map. There are 22 cases of varying difficulty levels.
Setup
Spread out the map, set out the detective tokens, and turn to the case you want to solve!
Gameplay
Each case has a very brief introduction to read with a picture so you know what you’re looking for to start, and then there’s a specific task to do or question to answer: Find Fernando at the beach! Who stole the diamond?
When you think you’ve figured it out, turn to the next page to see if you’re correct, and proceed to the next task. (You can appoint a “lead investigator” who’s in charge of the book—they can check to see if you’re right, and then sit out the task if you’re wrong so everyone else can continue looking.) There are always at least a couple of pages per case, but some cases have several parts to them.
One of the features of the map is that it will show the same character multiple times on the map, tracking their movement through the city. Quite often you’ll need to backtrack from the starting scene to see how they got there, or follow them forward to see where they go next. The detective tokens are particularly useful for marking a path clearly through the city.
Proceed through the tasks until you solve the case, and then turn the page and start the next case!
Why You Should Play MicroMacro Kids: Crazy City Park
I really enjoyed the original MicroMacro games, which I played with my youngest even though she was only 7 at the time and a lot of the crimes were, uh, not entirely appropriate for her. The second version included some content icons on the cases so you could tell whether a case had more explicit themes. But I’m glad there’s now a version that is specifically made for kids: instead of solving murders and figuring out who’s having an affair, you’re tracking down stolen candy and following a kid on her adventures throughout the day.
Most of the cases here just require observation to find the particular characters or objects, but it can still require a little intuition. Also, you’ll definitely spot elements from other cases as you play. What happened over there with the ambulance? Why are those folks running around with bags of money? Is this pair of glasses on the ground important? There are also lots of details that aren’t parts of cases at all … or at least not ones from the book. The website includes 25 more mini-cases to solve using the same map.
My daughter and I played through all of the cases in the book over the course of two days, and we had a lot of fun with it. There was only one case we didn’t really care for—it was finding some lost dogs, and in this case you just had to locate the individual dogs scattered all over the map, without the usual tracking them over time. Each dog only appeared once, rather than appearing multiple times as they traveled around the city, so it was just a pure search-and-find. What I like most about MicroMacro is the way that a story plays out as you follow characters around the map, so that one case didn’t feel as satisfying. But that’s only one of the cases, and the rest are all entertaining.
If you and your kids like search-and-find games, this one’s definitely worth checking out!
Visit the MicroMacro website for more about the series!
Click here to see all our tabletop game reviews.
To subscribe to GeekDad’s tabletop gaming coverage, please copy this link and add it to your RSS reader.
Disclosure: GeekDad received a copy of this game for review purposes.
