MicroMacro: Crime City Review

What if Where's Waldo? was turned into a board game? You'd end up with MicroMacro: Crime City, the first in a series of cooperative hidden object games where everyone around the table is searching a massive map of Crime City to locate various criminals, witness their crimes, deduce their motives, track down accomplices, spot their murder weapons, and more.

I've always enjoyed hidden object games, search games, spot the difference games, etc. Yet I have to admit I was skeptical when I first heard about MicroMacro: Crime City, and became even more skeptical when it kept getting praise from everywhere. "How could it be that good?" I thought to myself—and thus deprived myself of this gem for a long, long time.

Turns out, MicroMacro: Crime City really is that enjoyable. As long as you go into it with proper expectations, I think anyone can have a fantastic time with it. Here's how my experience with it went and what you need to know to decide if this is the kind of game you'll enjoy.

This review is based on my own personal copy of MicroMacro: Crime City, which I bought used from BGG's GeekMarket. Not a free review copy.

In this review:

• Overview
• Setup and Table Footprint
• Learning Curve
• Game Experience
  • Decision Space
  • Luck Factor
  • Player Interaction
  • Fun Factor
  • Pacing
• Replayability
• Production Quality
• The Bottom Line

Overview

MicroMacro: Crime City is fascinatingly unique. The entire game is played on a single, massive, folded-up sheet of poster paper that depicts Crime City and its hundreds of inhabitants.

Each character in Crime City is drawn numerous times around the map and each one is playing out their own stories: navigating the city, meeting with secret lovers, stopping by drug stores, holding rallies, getting into cars with accomplices, dumping bodies in the river, weaving through alleys, etc. Dozens of these narratives are illustrated across Crime City, and your job is to explore the map, find the criminals, follow their tracks, and deduce what they've done and why they've done it.

MicroMacro: Crime City is structured into individual cases, with each case being a packet of cards that guide you through a particular crime. The first card usually points you to the scene of the crime, then subsequent cards pose follow-up questions that ask you to figure out other details relating to the crime. Every step of the way, you search the map to find the clues you need. The harder the case, the harder it is to piece clues together.

For example, the tutorial case (called "The Top Hat") starts you off with some backstory on a character who was heading to the local pub when he noticed his hat was missing. The first card in this case is "Find the pub," tasking you with searching the map and finding the pub (with a minor clue on where it is). Once you find the pub, you turn over the card to confirm you found it. Then you work on the next card, which asks, "What happened on the way? How was the top hat nicked?" You look around some more to find the scene of his top hap being stolen, then check the back of the card to confirm. Lastly, the case asks, "Where are the culprits sitting with the loot?" And you wrap up by searching the map for the culprits who now have his hat.

The gameplay is very much like the Where's Waldo? or I Spy books we're all familiar with. But MicroMacro: Crime City infuses that gameplay with narrative, deduction, and the need to connect clues, resulting in a richer experience. It really feels like you're a detective solving crimes!

Setup and Table Footprint

MicroMacro: Crime City is played on a singular poster map that's quite large. So large, in fact, that it has the largest table footprint of any board game I've ever had in my collection.

Measuring 43 inches by 29.5 inches, the map eclipses anything smaller than a dinner table—and even some dinner tables won't be large enough to accommodate it. When I got tired of hassling around with it on my modest gaming table, I ended up resorting to my bed and the ground. (Alternatively, you could hang it on the wall and play like that. Would be fun, I imagine!)

Don't get me wrong. The size is good. The map needs to be this big in order to hold all the illustrations of all the different stories going on throughout Crime City; the game would be too easy and simple otherwise. But be aware that you need ample space to play this.

Fortunately, table space issues aside, MicroMacro: Crime City is a delightfully simple game with almost no setup time. Once you unfold the map, you just pick a case, take the cards out of the packet, and you're ready to go.

Learning Curve

When I say that MicroMacro: Crime City is delightfully simple, I mean it. This is the kind of game that young kids can play, albeit with the help of someone older who can connect the clues and advance the plot, especially for the more difficult cases. (But even the hard cases aren't that hard.)

At the end of the day, MicroMacro: Crime City is about exploring the map and spotting what you need to spot. That's 80 percent of the game. You don't have to wrestle with many rules, and even non-gamers can easily poke in and join you in your search as long as you tell them what you're looking for.

Game Experience

Decision Space

On the one hand, there is no "decision space" in MicroMacro: Crime City because you aren't making any decisions. You're given something to look for, and you look for it. In the tougher cases, you might have to do some logical deduction work to figure out exactly what to look for, but the main thing you're doing is searching the map. No decisions.

So if you go into MicroMacro: Crime City expecting a game in the traditional sense, prepare to be disappointed. It's more of a puzzle than anything. You're figuring out the answers to questions using visual clues, and then you're using those answers to figure out what the next questions are.

If you like riddles and logic puzzles, you'll like this. If you like Where's Waldo? or I Spy, you'll like this. And if you like both, you'll love this.

Luck Factor

There's absolutely no luck in MicroMacro: Crime City. I've played through all the cases, start to finish, and each one is entirely solvable using logic and deduction. You'll find no random chance or other bits of luckiness here. All the cases are well-designed and systematic, through and through.

Player Interaction

I wouldn't say there's much player interaction in MicroMacro: Crime City, especially during the "search for clues" times. If you're playing with others, you might divvy up the map and search your own areas of it, and you might chat about the fun things you spot while looking around, and you might verbalize your thoughts as you struggle to locate elusive scenes.

All that to say, you could play MicroMacro: Crime City solo if you wanted to, and you might even prefer it that way if you don't like others "getting in the way" of your investigation. But I love the chatter that comes up, particularly when you're trying to piece together clues and make deductions, bouncing ideas back and forth with your partner or group.

Fun Factor

The whole idea of working through the investigation together with others is, for me, the biggest draw of MicroMacro: Crime City. Sure, it'd be satisfying enough to go through it alone, and I'd still feel like a winner for figuring out all the answers myself. But that's only half the fun of it.

To miss out on all the cooperative thinking-out-loud with others? To pass up on the lively discussions as character narratives play out across the map? To not be able to share in those eureka moments when disparate fragments of evidence suddenly click and fit together? All of that makes up the other half of fun in MicroMacro: Crime City. And yeah, it is fun.

Don't get me wrong. I'm normally the type of person who wants to work solo, who wants to figure things out on my own, who sometimes feels like "help" from others just slows me down. But MicroMacro: Crime City doesn't tap into any of that. It has puzzle and deduction elements, but it's mostly an activity and experience—one that feels somewhat empty when alone.

I keep coming back to this analogy, but it's like going through a Where's Waldo? book alone versus with someone else. It's totally possible to enjoy it solo, and it's a nice way to pass the time. But when you're searching the pages with one or two others, you're bound to make stray comments about all the random stuff you find along the way, and those stray comments help to elevate the overall enjoyment of it.

Or here's another example: escape rooms. I could easily go to an escape room by myself, work through it, and come out the other side successful. I might even be more successful going at it alone. But success isn't the ultimate goal of an escape room—it's the interactions you have with your group and the moments you share on that road to success or failure. That's how I feel about MicroMacro: Crime City and why I wouldn't play it alone.

Pacing

The pacing in MicroMacro: Crime City is phenomenal. You can spend as much time as you want to solve a clue, meaning you get to dictate your own pace. If you ever get stuck and just want to move on, you can simply flip your current case card over to get the answer, allowing you to maintain progress without hassle. There's no downtime. Everyone involved is active at all times, either searching the map or thinking through solutions.

And MicroMacro: Crime City plays fast. The easier cases can be solved beginning-to-end in about 10 minutes, while the hardest cases can take up to 20 minutes. And the cases are all designed well, leading you on narrative arcs that get you invested from their first cards and compel you to keep going in order to figure out what happened.

You can play one case at a time, or you can have a marathon session and blow through them all at once. It's up to you!

Replayability

MicroMacro: Crime City contains 16 unique cases that range in difficulty from 1 star to 5 stars, and each case can have up to a dozen different cards. They're quick to go through and not super involved, so gamers with good memory will likely remember how to solve them pretty easily.

Which means MicroMacro: Crime City isn't all that replayable, at least immediately after you go through it. If you were to wait a year or longer, you might come back to it and forget enough of the details to enjoy going through it again—in the same way that you could return to a Where's Waldo? book after a while and have fun with it again—but I suspect it won't be as fun the second time around since the novelty of it has worn off.

But as a whole, I find it immensely satisfying and engaging enough to want to play more. There are follow-up games in the MicroMacro series to move onto once you've finished this one. Each individual box may not be replayable, but the overall concept surely is.

Production Quality

For how minimal the game is, MicroMacro: Crime City feels wonderfully well-produced. Clearly a lot of care and attention went into the drawings on the massive map, and the art style is charming. There are even some Easter eggs to find as you search, with non-case stories playing out among background characters.

It's just a delight. I found myself smiling and enjoying every minute of this, and much of that due to the illustrations. Sure, it's just black-and-white drawings, but it pulls you in and gets you invested right from the first minute. Just seeing this massive map unfold is intriguing, and you can immediately tell that there's so much to discover across Crime City.

The case cards carry that aesthetic forward, and the design of those cards is clean and functional. I appreciate that the cards are marked with order numbers so they're easy to sort in case they get mixed up, and the front-back mechanism that shows you the answer to every step of the case is elegant.

Honestly, the whole package feels perfectly put together, and each card even has little icons to indicate how child-friendly the narrative of a particular case is. Playing with a young one and don't want to expose them to murder or adultery? Skip those and stick to the petty crime cases instead.

My only real gripe with the game is that the map is extremely vulnerable to wear and tear. Every time you fold it up and put it away only to take it back out and unfold it again, the creases get weaker and weaker. My map has started to tear in some spots. It's also easy to accidentally rip if you aren't careful, as the map can get caught under an elbow or hand and quickly tear if it were yanked around unexpectedly.

The Bottom Line

MicroMacro: Crime City was one of my favorite board gaming experiences in 2024 and I think it's worth every penny. I love the art, I love the deduction, I love the seamless cooperative design, I love the variety in cases, and I love that you can hang up and display the map when you're done.

At 16 cases and an average of 15 minutes per case, you're looking at about 4 hours of total entertainment. It's more than worth it, especially if you're playing through it with a partner or group. It's rare to find a game that's so simple yet so engaging, so pure, and so satisfying.

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