/pic7161499.jpg)
Micro Architects is a 1-4 player, city building game which takes 30-60 minutes to play. As a city architect your role is to plan the layout of your city, build landmarks, provide services, manage residents and deal with random events that affect your city.
The game is played over 3 rounds with players scoring after each round. On your turn pick a building from the ones set up at the beginning of a round and place it on your city board and try to create patterns based on goal cards. When picking a landmark, take a landmark tile to go with it and try to fulfill its requirements. After filling up a whole district with buildings, gain a boat. 2 boats let you acquire a service for your city which makes it more attractive to the residents. After a round is completed score points in 3 ways:
GOALS - each pattern is worth a number of points
LANDMARKS - each landmark has a unique requirement for where it needs to be placed and what other buildings should it be surrounded by
SERVICES - each service provides points for a specific set of buildings in your city
At any point of your turn you are able to use construction tokens to demolish buildings and build them again in a different spot, use buildings from an additional building pool or have more choice when choosing the right service for your city.
RESIDENTS module
More advanced players will definitely want to play with an extra module that comes in the box - RESIDENTS.
This module adds an additional board to each player's city board where you place residents that come to your city. Residents allow you to score additional points, reuse your construction tokens and gain extra boats which in turn let you acquire more services for your city.
EVENT module
Spice things up with the event deck! Pick a card and see whether you’ll have to deal with an impending disaster or strike of good fortune. Disasters can ruin your plans if you don’t prepare for them in time and positive events might give you that extra boost on your path to victory.
The game ends after the scoring phase for round 3. The player with the most points is the winner and becomes the chief architect!
—description from the designer
- A ton of game in a small box
- Playing the residents module is a must
- Great at all player counts, even solo
- Interesting scoring mechanism
- Offers an incredible amount of game for its size
- Hopes to replace other games in the same genre
- Innovative
- City building
- City
- Skyline Express
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
- city building — A one-to-four-player city-building game where you play as a city architect. Your aim is to plan your layout of your city, build landmarks, provide services, manage residents, and deal with random events that affect your city.
- Event system — An event module that adds events.
- Pattern Building — Picking buildings to place in your city to try to create patterns based on goal cards.
- Set Collection — Acquire services from your city, which will make for more attractive to residents.
- Variable player powers — Asymmetrical nature of each player's available guild.
Video topics + discussion points
Quotes (from this video)
- Roll your meeple, build your city.
- Supreme D says that I love the uniqueness of rolling meeples rather than dice, as well as the sheer amount of build options to customize your perfect city.
- The game is also quite a looker with its plastic pieces in a variety of colors.
- And you do, you roll your meeple, and you get very angry at your meeple, because they don't roll well, because they're meeple. And they land They are like wider than regular meeple. It works It does really work very well, but you just go, "Oh, come on. Why aren't you Why aren't you working right?"
- And the game does have incredible, like, table presence, because you're building up these huge skyscrapers.
- Join other ambitious guild leaders in mining and developing the famous city of silver during its period of rapid economic growth and expansion in the 14th century.
- The game features a real-life supply and demand experience.
- Kenneth K says that I recently acquired Coimbra, this is a very interesting game with an analog device for controlling stock market prices.
- Luke P says that I replayed this fantastic economic game at AirCon and was blown away by how smoothly the game ran, particularly with new players to the game and with breaks for chitchat.
- Everyone just seems to be really enjoying this.
- Man, this is fun.
- I do think that the box cover does the game a disservice.
- Because the box cover is like it's black with a like a thing white like a coin some silver I guess on the front.
- It's one of the most beautiful games I've ever seen on the table.
- All the artwork and the dark and the the the buildings all brightly colored on the dark background and it's absolutely gorgeous.
- It really is so much more beautiful on the inside of the game than on the outside of the box.
- So it's one of those I'm going to have to learn eventually just because it's going to come up.