When we featured the original MicroMacro Crime City game earlier this year on Board's Eye View it had already won the coveted Spiel des Jahres critics' award as the Game of the Year. Tho' essentially a Where's Wally (aka Where's Waldo) variant, it was the sheer simplicity of MicroMacro Crime City that added to its appeal as players (usually, and preferably, just one or two) pored over a large (110 x 75 cm) black & white sheet to locate the many crimes and misdemeanours occurring in Johannes Sich's meticulously rendered cartoon city. Given the game's huge success, it was already inevitable that Pegasus Spiele would be publishing sequels, and Full House has followed quickly on the heels of the original game; hitting retail shelves just in time for Christmas.
Full House is more of the same: another 110 x 75 cm paper mat, more sets of cards detailing the crimes to solves and another fresnel lens magnifying glass to help you search out the minute detail in the drawing. As with the original MicroMacro Crime City game, the paper mat is a four-dimensional depiction of the city, in that play involves spotting the multiple iterations of the same character to trace back their progress over time. Full House isn't an expansion, however, in that it is a standalone game - you don't need the previous version to play it.
That said, in the unlikely event that you have a big enough table, the map is designed to match up with the original MicroMacro Crime City game map and there will be characters that you'll be able to track between the two maps. That's a nice touch.
If you've enjoyed playing MicroMacro Crime City then you'll surely want more and you'll want to add Full House to your collection. And having both games means you'll have two fresnel lens magnifying glasses so that you won't have to share when playing the games with two. If you've not yet discovered the MicroMacro Crime City experience, then you can just as well start off with the Full House game as with the original game. You don't lose out at all if you play this first and the original game second.
As the game is bound to appeal to children as well as adults, it's worth mentioning again here that some of the crimes have an adult theme. The cases are coded for this, as well as for difficulty, tho' this is really as a reminder for parental discretion. There's really nothing in either game that's going to subject them to any images or topics they won't routinely see in much more graphic detail on TV and there's nothing here that will give children nightmares, but full marks to the Full House publishers in going the extra mile in flagging the parental discretion warning.