The Microrama Collection is a reprint of four small and well-received solo games from 2022–2024. It seems they’re popular still, with the campaign being fully funded in less than 20 minutes (which is, to a fair approximation, the amount of time each game needs to play) and is currently sitting at 4× overfunded.
Without further ado, the games are…
Deck 52: Final Bus
Deck 52: Final Bus, is a ‘Quick survival game with tight hand management and post-apocalyptic tension,’ in which you’re roaming a post-apocalyptic wasteland in your bus (bus?!) in search of a safe haven called ‘Deck 52,’ collecting resources vital for your survival. You’ll do this by building out a tableau of map cards from a deck of twenty, aiming to complete three objectives selected at random from eight, such as ‘find fuel’ or ‘resolve nine map cards.’
You play as one of a five heroes, each of which has their own abilities and penalties and your tableau starts as just the bus card. On each turn, you choose a face up card in the tableau, and assuming you can meet its requirements (e.g., you need a torch before you can interact with certain cards), you take the actions on that card, which might be something that gains loot or helps you achieve the mission objectives, or it might be an enemy to defeat. Common actions are exploration (drawing more map cards and adding them adjacent to the current card) and ‘resolving’ the card (turning it facedown, meaning you can’t interact with it again).
If you manage to complete all three objectives, you’ve won. On the other hand, if your health drops to zero, or you find yourself unable to take an action (e.g., you can’t interact with any card in the tableau because you don’t meet their requirements), you lose.
The full game is a campaign of several missions as you journey to Deck 52. These missions increase in difficulty by adding a ‘skull card’ to the map deck at the start of each (these are additional hazards and bad guys) as well as some parts of the journey requiring a ‘threat card’ to be played. If you fail a mission in the campaign, before moving to the next, your current hero is removed from the game; you also either lose another hero card or return two loot cards to the deck. On the other hand, if you succeed, you can switch to another hero in your crew (if you managed to accumulate additional heroes in previous missions). You win the campaign if you can reach Deck 52; you lose if you run out of heroes before that.
This is a quick, light game, and I like the mechanisms for increasing mission difficulty across the campaign.
Gamma Guild
Gamma Guild is a quick-fire game involving ‘Strategic planning and smart combos in a compact medieval fantasy puzzle.’
The game looks a lot like solitaire, and the designer, Jacob Hadel, has even said that Klondike Solitaire was one of his inspirations. However, it’s got a lot more going on in it. You deal twelve ‘quest cards’ into a four by three grid—these are the twelve quests you need to complete, starting at the bottom of each column; the remaining quest cards are used as a countdown timer, representing the twelve days you have to complete the game. Each quest card typically has a number on the top left and a coloured icon on the right (red—strength, green—agility or blue—intelligence), along with some text giving instructions for completing them.
On each turn, you discard one day card, then deal four ‘guild member’ cards; like the quests, these have a number on the top left and a colour type on the right. To complete a quest, you place guild cards on top of them such that the sum of the guild numbers is equal to or greater than the quest number and the majority of the guild colour types are that of the quest card. For example, if a quest card shows the number 10 and a blue type, you could play two blue guild members with values 3 and 4 along with any other colour of value 5; you couldn’t use a blue 5 and a green 5, since that wouldn’t give blue the majority.
You don’t necessarily have to complete a quest in one turn, and can place guild cards on any to get closer to the objective. Having said that, some of the quests have different requirements, such that you must complete this quest in one turn; another example is requiring you to play a numerically increasing sequence rather than aim for a specific number. Some quests have effects on other visible quests as well, such as changing their numeric values.
If you choose not to play all your guild cards on quests, you send the remainder to the ‘guild perk mission.’ Guild cards can be inverted to show ‘perks’—action bonuses, such as the ability to be played as any colour. As soon as the mission has three cards, you can discard two and use the other as a perk, to be played at any time and then discarded.
Once a quest has been completed, it and its guild members are discarded, and the quest card above it in the grid is now active.
If you manage to remove all twelve quests from the table, you win; if the day count reaches zero first, you lose.
This is a delightfully simple game with a lot of potential for replayability, thanks to only half of the quest cards coming out per game.
Infinity Rogue: Space Dungeon
Infinity Rogue: Space Dungeon is a ‘Sci-fi dungeon crawling with push-your-luck tension and roguelike thrills.’
The game is played over three levels of increasing difficulty, in terms of both enemy strength and map layout. For each level, you select the appropriately numbered blueprint card to provide a map layout for the ‘space dungeon,’ which you then populate using facedown randomly selected room cards. At one end is the faceup starting room (containing the monster you have to defeat to get going), and at the other is the ‘boss room,’ through which you escape. Most of the rooms contain foes—known as BOTs, brutal opponent threats (hmm, trying a bit hard with the acronym?)—but some provide benefits or let you trade resources. On important room is the one containing the key you need before you can enter the boss room, so that’s the one you absolutely have to find as you navigate the dungeon.
On each turn after the first, you move to an adjacent unvisited room (i.e., a facedown card); if you don’t like this room (e.g., it contains a trap—and those can give serious damage), you can choose a different one, which you then must encounter. Once in a new room (or in the first room, at the start of the game), you resolve its effects, e.g., in a Blackjack-like card drawing battle with the room’s BOT: you deal from your deck and the BOT’s until the card total gets as close as they can to the maximum power for that level. The winner is the one with the larger power, unless it has exceeded the maximum and gone bust. The top card on the winning deck indicates the damage the loser takes, and battle continues until one or other participant is out of health points. Reward and trap rooms are similar, but there’s no opponent deck: you’re just pushing your luck to get as close to the maximum as possible.
There are a couple of other interesting wrinkles, such as having to pay a ‘power cell’ to shuffle your discard deck to form a new draw deck. While doing this, you can choose to reorient some of your cards to make them more powerful, though doing that to too many makes it more likely you’ll go bust during subsequent card draws. (Power cells are one of the resources you can find in the appropriate reward room, or can trade in the Barterdroid room.)
If you find the key and defeat the boss, you’ve succeeded at that level—just repeat that twice more! If you lose all your health, or thanks to poor navigation skills, end up unable to move into an unexplored room, you lose.
This is a cleverly constructed and nicely themed game, but I’m afraid it’s probably the one I like least of the bundle since I’m not a fan of push your luck games.
City of Fury
City of Fury has echoes of 80s Street Fighter video games, offering ‘Arcade-style street brawling in a bold cyberpunk microformat.’
This game’s packaged slightly differently to the others in the Microrama bundle: it’s been updated since its original release to offer a two-player competitive mode as well as the original solo mode.
I’ve not encountered one of these ‘nine card’ games before, but I gather it’s quite a popular Print & Play theme, and there’s an impressive amount of play in this tiny game, a winner in BoardGameGeek’s 2022 9-card P&P contest.
The aim of the (solo) game is to defeat the ‘boss man,’ but to do that, you have to tackle his minions first. Each enemy card has a picture of the minion on the front and a fragment of a street scene on the back; four minions and the boss man are placed facedown to form the street, with your card and two of the bad guys faceup below the cards at either end of the street. On each turn, you first choose a skill (punch, kick, shoot and dodge) to use, its strength indicated on your skill card—these skills include a move component, which you’ll use to bring you close enough to use the attack component, reducing the enemy’s health. After this, each enemy card on the board does the same, based on markings on its card—these cards have two sets of action markings, for use depending on which side of the enemy your card is.
If an enemy has been defeated, the ‘scrolling’ phase of the turn happens: the defeated enemy is turned facedown and added to the right of the playing area, and the leftmost street card is turned faceup to become a new enemy at the other end of the street. You can see how this will gradually bring the boss man into play, as you defeat minion after minion, scrolling the street until that’s the next enemy card to be revealed.
I’m genuinely impressed by how much is crammed into this minute game, and the ‘8-bit’ graphic style is just the icing on the cake. It really does feel like a card game version of the video games, and I think this is my favourite of the bunch.
Final Words
These are lovely little games, and I could imagine wiling away snippets of time playing any of them.
Please note that most of the description above is based on the original game releases (e.g., I’ve not uncovered any information about the two-player mode for City of Fury), and details may change before the final Microrama Collection versions are published next November.
You can find out more about this collection of games on its Gamefound page, and rulebooks for most of them can be found via BoardGameGeek. Some are also still available in Print & Play versions if you’re prepared to hunt.
About the author
When not playing boardgames or blogging about them, L.N. Hunter keeps himself occupied writing fiction: a comic fantasy novel, The Feather and the Lamp, sits alongside close to 100 short stories in various magazines and anthologies, and on websites and podcasts (see https://linktr.ee/L.N.Hunter for a full list). L.N. occasionally masquerades as a software developer or can be found unwinding in a disorganised home in Carlisle, UK, along with two cats and a soulmate.
