If you’ve never come across Thistroy Games’ series of ‘micro’ games, you’re really missing out. They really are just sooo cyoot! (Sorry, couldn’t help myself.) They come in tiny boxes, not much bigger than hand-sized (15cm × 10cm × 7cm for Micro Architects), but an awful lot is packed inside.
The original Micro Architects was released in 2023, with a new expansion, Big City Vacation, coming later this year and currently on Gamefound.
Micro Architects
Micro Architects is a quick (30–60 minute) 1–4 player pattern-building game in which you score points through filling slots on a player board of 32 spaces, arranged as a grid of city blocks. Some spaces are beside rivers, some mountains, and some are within green blocks (grass?) and some grey (commercial districts?). Over 3 rounds of play, you draw buildings of different colours from the uppermost row of a shared drafting area and place them to form patterns shown on goal cards, individual service cards and landmark requirement cards—these are all similar-ish in terms of pattern criteria (e.g., buildings on specific ground, or river/mountain adjacency, or certain colour combinations within blocks), but gained in different ways. The goal cards are common to all players, and while all 6 are visible throughout the game, only 2 are used per round, letting players choose between short term scoring and planning for future rounds. One type of building, the black one, is termed a landmark; playing one of those into your map lets you take a landmark requirement card to score based on the other buildings in that block. Service cards may be purchased during the game by paying two boats, and boats are acquired when you completely fill a city block. Players also have action tokens, which can be used to, e.g., switch buildings around in your map (which can be helpful in the trade-up from one round’s goals to the next).
The original Micro Architects includes a couple of additional modules. The Residents module gives each player a resident board and at game setup, person tokens are placed alongside half the buildings in the draw area. Drawing a building also takes its resident token, which is placed on the resident board; completing rows on that board gives bonuses, but each row can contain only one colour of resident. The Events module adds, well, event cards, to be resolved when each row of buildings in the draw area is emptied, and they may apply penalties (such as removing buildings from the map) or provide benefits (such as extra scoring) to all players.
The solo mode is provided via a card-based automa (AIDA, for Artificial Intelligence Driven Architect)
Big City Vacation
This is Micro Architects’ first expansion, and adds 2 new modules.
The smaller of the pair is Big City, which provides skyscrapers and hotels. The former are larger buildings which occupy 2 adjacent spaces and give you additional victory points if you can grab them. When you complete a block, if you have 2 adjacent buildings of the same colour, you can take a matching skyscraper (if there are any left) and put it on your board in place of the 2 buildings—note that some skyscrapers have additional requirements, such as needing the other buildings in the block to be of certain colours. Hotels simply act as wildcard tokens when scoring goal and service cards (but not landscape ones).
The other module, Vacation (they didn’t think too hard about what to call the overall expansion, did they?), includes a little cruise ship which traverses a new board, taking in all the sights.
Similar to the Residents module, additional resort tokens (palm trees, beach huts, lighthouses and umbrella-sporting drinks) are placed beside some buildings in the draw area. (When using both of these modules together, every building ends up with an additional token). When you take the building, you also take the associated resort token and place it in an appropriately marked slot on the resort board. When all of the slots beside the next space on the cruise ship’s route have been filled, the ship can move into that space, gaining a range of bonuses.
Final Words
Micro Architects is a cute game, and incredibly compact. The player boards are dual-layered, which is a significant benefit for a game this small, since it’s all too easy to displace buildings when placing or moving others. The game pieces are attractively-screened wooden tokens, and everything seems well-made.
The campaign offers a natty, but not essential, neoprene main board mat as an add-on, as well as many of Thistroy Games’ previous micro games. The prices of everything don’t seem unreasonable compared to other campaigns I’ve been looking at recently, but remember that VAT will be applied on top, not to mention import duty if you cross the £135 threshold. I’m hoping a friendly retailer will be taking an interest, though, rather than paying the crowdfunding premium.
Finally, if you want to give the game a spin before deciding whether it’s for you, the campaign page contains links to Tabletopia and Tabletop Simulator versions. Slightly annoyingly, while there’s a link to the rulebook for the base game, I’ve not spotted one for the expansion.
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.
