Micro Architects

For all those big and grandiose crowdfunded games with huge oversized boxes, more miniatures than you can reasonably store, and multiple expansions out the gate, there's something to admire for games produced that fit into reasonable space saving ways. Thistroy Games set out to do that with their Micro series of games. I was initially interested in the project because the price seemed reasonable for what you were getting.

Admittedly, though, there is something to be said about size and presence - it took me almost a year to finally play Micro Architects. Partially because there were other games I was more interested in at the time, but the other part was just due to the bloat of components within the tiny box. I kind of feared trying to squeeze it all back in after unboxing it.

At its core, its a very basic drafting game: over the course of 3 rounds you'll be drafting buildings from a common area. You'll draft from one set of rows until its empty, so you'll know up front what buildings are available for the entire round which allows for a little bit of planning and pivoting for strategy.

The one gripe here is that because its so packed with wooden pieces, I feel like its hard to get a good "shuffle" for the buildings in the bag. The bag probably needs to be twice as big to comfortably rummage around for randomness. But it also can't be that big because there's not a whole lot of box to store things in to start with - "Micro" to the 'T'.

The downside to the compactness is that some of the pieces, notably the wrenches for player actions, are ridiculously tiny and I can imagine they can be hard for some people to pick up for how small they are. But even for a small and compact game, clearly they were very considerate with the production here: all the player boards are dual layered, every building and resident wooden piece has screen printing on both sides. The game has quality to it, which is a little surprising given its reasonable price.

Going back to the drafting, there's 6 types of buildings, each with different colors and shapes to differentiate from each other. One could imagine that pulling from the bag you could in theory feel out specific pieces, but that's kind of difficult to do and I'd say if you're just grabing handfuls then it's not really a big deal.

The most important buildings are the landmarks. You have 8 blocks of 2-by-2 squares of spaces where you can place buildings, however for landmarks you can only have 1 per block. When acquiring landmarks you also assign it a restriction tile because it wants to be in a specific location, such as in grass or stone, next to water or mountains, and have certain buildings within the same block as it. If you manage to fulfill those requirements, that's points that are scored at the end of each round.

So there's a race for landmarks, but the other buildings will matter as well. Not only are you vying for certain colors for landmark requirements but you'll also want to get certain buildings to fulfill end of round scoring. There will be 6 goal cards per game, so you'll know up front what to go for and when you need to accomplish them. And the final incentive is completing blocks within your city, for that you get a boat which can net you access to getting Service cards - these cards also score every round for pairs of building colors.

After those three rounds, you tally up your final score and see who wins. There are ways to manipulate your buildings after the fact by using the wrenches as action tokens, which are more like bonus actions since they don't take up your turn. But otherwise it's a fairly simple draft and placement puzzle. The end result is you do get a very pretty looking city with the mix of buildings and boats in the river.

Also in the box were two expansions. The first one adds a new set collection mechanic with Residents, basically half of the buildings have a resident that you can draft if you pick that building. The goal is to acquire residents of the same color, landmarks being a wild color, and doing so will net you bonuses such as points, actions, and even more boats. The second is just a straight forward event deck, you'll draw event cards that activate once a row has been completely drafted, with positive effects such as bonus actions and negative effects where you remove buildings from your city. The events are kind of a mixed bag.

Overall, the game is nice, it's a small box that holds a lot inside. But for me, I find the game to be lacking in terms of being interesting. What I mean by that is that it doesn't really do anything different or new that sets itself apart. The drafting is pretty standard, the placement puzzle is a little novel but it's not really new, the race for personal scoring is seen in other games. There's a little bit with the bonus actions to manipulate your board and even some of the draft, but it doesn't feel unique to say "this is what makes this game", you know?

In fact, that aspect, the whole Service card for pair scoring, I kind of didn't like that those were the main thing to use boats for. Sure, you could use a boat to get two wrenches, but two boats gets you a card and you can use a wrench to pick from 2 more options in addition to the 3 displayed. And since you're collecting buildings and these get scored often, it's kind of a no-brainer to always try for a service card of buildings you have the most pairs of, or intend to go for. Also, that display of Service cards can get pretty stagnate, and if there's nothing you want you kind of have to go fishing for better cards.

So to me, its a very "by the book" drafting game. It looks nice, can't complain about the produciton and the rules make sense overall, with a few minor errata for things that may not make sense or for exception situations. But I can't say it isn't as compelling of a game to play. For that, it may not have enough staying power - but maybe its small space let's it sit around for longer. We'll have to see.