MicroMacro: Kids – Crazy City Park

I love the original MicroMacro game – it’s a cooperative detective type game mixed with hidden pictures. There’s a huge line drawn image with characters in a city but it shows multiple times all together, so you can follow the path of what one character did in the day as you see multiple copies of that character in the image. Each case has multiple step by step questions that lead you to eventually figure out the story behind the mystery as you find the answer to each one in the image. My 5yo kids were always wanting to play it, but a lot of the cases involve things like murder and adultery, which I didn’t feel like explaining to my kids (I can anticipate all the “why” questions). So I was super excited when I heard about MicroMacro: Kids!

My kids were also very excited when we got the box – they immediately recognized that it was MicroMacro but that it was for kids. So they wanted to play right away.

This is very similar to the original MicroMacro, but it has a few quality of life improvements that I really like. Firstly, the cases are in a spiral bound booklet instead of cards in envelopes. So you can just turn the pages and leave it open to whichever case you were on. Another thing the game has is big tiddlywink type transparent tokens. You can use these to mark spots on the map so you remember what you were looking at. This is super helpful because with the original we’d try to keep track of the path with our fingers and then run out of fingers (or not be able to reach everything).

My kids love the game – they love looking for the characters and finding them, and they also like seeing all the other things happening in the city. I do find it sometimes hard to play with both of them since once you find a path then there’s one place you’re focusing on, so when one kid leans over to look it blocks the view for the other. This also happened with the main version and I didn’t like playing it with too many people. But with my kids they’re less patient and want to see everything  I ended up having them switch off for each question and that worked pretty well.

The image itself is on a really large folded up sheet of paper. You’re supposed to unfold it and put it on the table to play, but it was hard for my kids to see the part that was across the table since they’re short and I don’t want them climbing on the table. We also tried it on the floor but then they leaned on the paper and bent it (and it ripped a little). So it’s also hard for younger kids to see since they’re usually short.

But overall, despite it being difficult for them to see everything, my kids still love looking for the characters and solving the cases. I love the improvements from the original MicroMacro and I love that the cases are kid friendly and so far seem to have happy endings. We’ve played 5 of the cases so far – some involved missing kids/animals but they weren’t hostile reasons and they seem appropriate for young kids. So if you and your kids like mysteries and hidden pictures, MicroMacro: Kids is a lot of fun!

Disclaimer: I received a free review copy of MicroMacro: Kids presented by Hachette Boardgames USA.